Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir
by Rachel Louise Snyder (Bloomsbury, $29)
You may come to hate Rachel Louise Snyder’s father, but don’t expect her to do the same, said
Katie Roiphe in The Washington Post. The award-winning author of 2019’s No Visible Bruises “seems more interested in bearing witness, in high-level storytelling, than dividing the world into villains and victims,” and her “superb” new memoir applies that ethic to her own coming of age. Snyder was 8 when her mother died, and was still grieving when her father moved her and her brother to suburban Chicago, embraced a strict evangelical ethos, and began beating them when they fell out of line. One day, he and his second wife lined up four suitcases at the door and ordered Snyder their children to leave. Snyder was 16 and soon living out of a car.
“The aftermath proved complicated,” said Julia M. Klein in The Boston Globe. Snyder had rebelled against her father’s rules. She drank, did drugs, brawled with her stepmother, and was expelled from her small Christian school. After her eviction, as she pieced together work and strung together dead-end romances, she occasionally reached out to her father, and at times he responded with kindness and financial support. “There was love there, however obscured.” And then we see her earn her GED, enroll at a small college, and find purpose in writing and reporting. At that point, “her difficult past becomes an asset.” It makes her fearless about looking hard at humanity’s dark side. Her 2019 book on domestic violence was one result.
“Knowing in advance how her story ends doesn’t make it any less astonishing,” said Rochelle Olson in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. An author and writing professor, “she has built a tremendous career raising the voices of those who need it most: the unseen and vulnerable.” Her family story, meanwhile, took a surprise turn when her stepmother developed cancer, bringing about a reconciliation that didn’t extinguish Snyder’s candor about her upbringing. “I want to say that my parents did the best they could under the circumstances,” she writes. “But I don’t think this is true.”