Women We Buried, Women We Burned
A Memoir
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4.1 • 16 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Kirkus Best Nonfiction Title of 2023
"Snyder shows us how to summon the courage to imagine in a cruel and dangerous world. A beautiful book." -Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Rogues, Empire of Pain, and Say Nothing
"How do you remember every detail and make the reader feel like they saw, heard, and felt each moment? I have no idea, actually, but Rachel Louise Snyder has done it." –Masha Gessen, National Book Award winning author of The Future Is History and Surviving Autocracy
"A gorgeous memoir that parses the patriarchy with an endearing frankness as fierce as it is, astonishingly, forgiving." -Beth Macy, New York Times bestselling author of Dopesick and Raising Lazarus
"The hope contained on these pages is hard won, and all the more precious due to the struggles from which it emerges." -Tayari Jones, New York Times bestselling author of An American Marriage
From the author of the groundbreaking, award-winning No Visible Bruises, a riveting memoir of survival, self-discovery, and forgiveness sure to captivate readers who loved Tara Westover's Educated and Jeanette Walls' The Glass Castle.
For decades, Rachel Louise Snyder has been a fierce advocate reporting on the darkest social issues that impact women's lives. Women We Buried, Women We Burned is her own story.
Snyder was eight years old when her mother died, and her distraught father thrust the family into an evangelical, cult-like existence halfway across the country. Furiously rebellious, she was expelled from school and home at age 16. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually travelling the globe.
Survival became her reporter's beat. 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. When she returned to the States with a family of her own, it was with a new perspective on old family wounds, and a chance for healing from the most unexpected place.
A piercing account of Snyder's journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of domestic violence, Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a memoir that embodies the transformative power of resilience.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Investigative journalist Rachel Louise Snyder’s hard-hitting memoir examines the aftermath of childhood trauma. Snyder was a young girl when her mother died and her father remarried and moved the family across the country to immerse them in an abusive, evangelical Christian lifestyle. By 16, Snyder had failed out of school and was living in a car. If not for a man who helped her get a GED and into a local college, she may not have become the acclaimed correspondent she is today, specializing in stories that affect women, particularly victims of domestic violence. With raw, unflinching honesty, Snyder charts her path back home, where she ultimately, and shockingly, becomes her ill stepmother’s caretaker. Without sentimentality, she shows us what motherhood, self-discovery, and true compassion look like. Women We Buried, Women We Burned is a memoir of grief, neglect, and empowerment.
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.
