Women We Buried, Women We Burned
a memoir
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
Following the acclaimed No Visible Bruises, a piercing account of the author’s childhood in an Evangelic Christian community, her teenage escape, and her career as a reporter at the frontline of the global epidemic of violence against women.
Award-winning journalist Rachel Louise Snyder has spent her career reporting on abuse that happens under the cover of ‘private life’. And yet the story of her own troubled family is one she has always kept locked away.
Snyder was eight when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious against this life, she was expelled from school, and then from home. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, she soon found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually travelling the globe. In places like India, Tibet, and Niger, she interviewed those who had been through the unimaginable. In Cambodia, where she lived for six years, she watched a country reckon with the horrors of its own recent history.
Written with a storyteller’s gift for immediacy, and weaving the personal with the universal, Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a necessary story of family struggle, female survival, and the passionate drive to bear witness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Snyder (No Visible Bruises) offers a penetrating memoir on grief and redemption. After her mother died when Snyder was eight years old, her father moved the family from Pennsylvania to Illinois, where he married a woman he met at an evangelical church. Snyder recounts her difficulty adjusting to her new life, highlighting the constant bickering between her, her brother, and their stepsiblings. The oppressive rules of evangelicalism, though, proved to be the hardest adjustment of all: "Cancer took my mother. But religion would take my life," she writes. Eventually, Snyder's teenage rebellion against religious strictures got her expelled from school and kicked out of her house. At age 16, she slept on friends' couches and worked odd jobs while studying for her GED. In college, a study abroad trip sparked a lifelong love of travel, and Snyder became an international journalist, reporting on violence against women. Once she returned to the U.S., she and her father took unsteady steps toward reconciliation. Snyder delivers her inspiring story with lyrical prose and sharp insights, particularly about the fraught father-daughter relationship at its center. It's an eloquent portrayal of the power of forgiveness.
