Women We Buried, Women We Burned : a memoir

‘Bravery and honesty are the cornerstone of the memoir, but Snyder adds to this — generosity. This is a compassionate telling of a sometimes brutal story. Women We Buried, Women We Burned reminds me of opera, with its beautiful sadness and artistic triumph. 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

Following the acclaimed No Visible Bruises, a piercing account of the author’s childhood in an evangelical 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.