True Story Non-Fic Club: Strangers by Belle Burden
We are thrilled to kick off our very first Non-Fic club meeting with Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden.
Bring your picnic blankets, food, and drinks, and get ready for a thoughtful conversation about love, marriage, identity, family, and the complicated ways we come to understand ourselves through the relationships that shape us.
Whether you are a longtime non-fiction reader or just starting to explore the genre, this will be a cozy, welcoming space to connect, reflect, and discuss the book.
About the book:
In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha’s Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together, building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.
In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was, someone nicknamed “Belle the Good,” gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.
With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.
This event is free to attend with no deposit required.
Wine About Books (WaB) is a Toronto book club for women, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who want reading to feel a bit more social and a lot less quiet. more on IG: @wab.bookclub 🍒