Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir

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 and Empire of Pain

＂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

For decades, journalist 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.

When eight-year-old Rachel’s mother died, her distraught father thrust the family into extreme evangelicalism. After a childhood marked by silent rage, teenage Rachel became outwardly furious. She was expelled from school and home at age sixteen. Living out of her car and relying on strangers, Rachel found herself masquerading as an adult, talking her way into college, and eventually traveling the globe.

Survival became her reporter’s beat. In places like India, Tibet, Niger, and Cambodia, she witnessed those who had been through the unimaginable choosing hope over despair. She returned to the States more appreciative of complexity, more generous, and open to the healing that would come from a most unexpected place.

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim, the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, and No Visible Bruises, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Hillman Prize, and the Helen Bernstein Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, LA Times Book Prize, and Kirkus Award. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Slate, and elsewhere. A 2020-2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Snyder is a Professor of Creative Writing and Journalism at American University. She lives in Washington, DC.