Strangers is a memoir of Burden falling in love with, marrying, building a family with, and being abandoned by her husband, James. Like autobiographies, memoirs are “written from the perspective of the author”; however, while autobiographies typically detail entire life stories and rely on facts, memoirs are a more flexible form that focuses on “an important part of [the author’s] life,” centering the author’s “feelings and assumptions” with the flexibility to recount the “story as [the author] remembers it” (Dukes, Jessica. “What Is a Memoir?” Celadon Books).

Subgenres of this kind of writing include transformational, confessional, professional, celebrity, and travel memoir. Transformational memoirs trace a life-changing era or experience in the author’s life, detailing how the author changed and why. Professional memoirs feature stories of the workplace or life-changing vocational experiences, while celebrity memoirs provide insight into famous cultural figures’ lives, often to contrast or correct media accounts. Travel memoirs, as the name suggests, depict journeys that have contributed to personal growth.

Originating in Christian conversion narratives popularized in the 17th century, modern transformational memoirs include The Glass Castle (2005) by Jeannette Walls and Educated (2018) by Tara Westover, both about escaping deeply dysfunctional families. Confessional memoirs often reveal disturbing secrets about the author’s past; examples such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963) and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation (1994) highlight women’s writing about mental health in particular. Strangers functions as both a transformational and confessional memoir. Burden reveals the intimate details of her marriage with and divorce from her husband and explores how the shocking end to her intimate relationship changed her.