Knowing the Ending

I read Belle Burden’s Strangers a few weeks ago. I’m not a big memoir person, but reviews said the book was amazing, and it was. It tells the story of her very abrupt separation and divorce.

About a quarter of the way into the story, she writes:

“And doesn’t it all look different, wouldn’t your own story look different, if you knew how it was going to end.”

When she’s writing her story, she is writing about the time that came before the separation, and when she was living that time, she lived those moments not knowing what would come next. But the way he left forced her to look at everything that came before and see it through that lens.

That line stuck with me since I read the book.