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Rachel Louise Snyder’s propulsive new memoir Women We Buried, Women We Burned begins with the death of her mother. Her father then marries another woman, moves to the Midwest, and raises Snyder in a suffocating Christian household where religion is repeatedly used to justify abuse. Snyder’s impeccable prose lets us live vicariously through her struggle to survive these compound losses, putting us in the middle of her fight against the forces determined to crush girls’ lives into smaller and smaller spaces. We join Snyder as she learns to thrive on a global scale, as she traces the insidious root system of patriarchy from her own small bedroom to the other side of the world. In the end, she invites us into a brave and loving space of forgiveness.
The story is impossible to forget. The characters have taken up long-term residence in my head, and I attribute these lasting echoes to Snyder’s direct narrative voice, her skillful scenes, and her willingness to wrench the most painful places open wide.
Women We Buried, Women We Burned is Snyder’s fourth book. She is the author of No Visible Bruises (2019), a book about domestic violence that was described as “extraordinary,” “gripping,” and “essential” by reviewers, and named a best book of 2019 by the Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Kirkus, and The New York Times. She is also the author of Fugitive Denim (2009) about the global fashion industry, and the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing (2020). I was honored to speak via Zoom with Rachel Louise Snyder about living with an awareness of death, American individualism, handwriting in a different color every day, and writing what’s “capital T True.”
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Your memoir begins and ends with cancer. It made me wonder how you think about your own death.
Rachel Louise Snyder
No one’s ever asked me that, and yet it has preoccupied so much of my life. One of the things I don’t write about in the book is that I got cancer during COVID—same kind of cancer my mother had. I’ve had treatment for it, and so far, so good. But I have always felt an awareness of the fallibility and fragility of the human body. Even before my mother died, she was very sick. She was in bed most of the five years before she died. Death really scared me. But living in Asia for as many years as I did made me see death as something that is just another plane of existence. When you die, people acknowledge you as an ancestor. I fear it less now…I certainly think about it. I’m curious about it.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
During your semester at sea, you met many other young people who had lost parents. You considered the possibility that your shared desire to explore the world and live fully came from that shared familiarity with death. However, you also showed how early losses can engender hopelessness, can make someone want to give up on life. How do these two perspectives on loss relate to one another?
Rachel Louise Snyder
That James Baldwin quote [which is referenced in the book] about how the most dangerous creation of any society is the man who has nothing to lose…to me, that’s mired in the negative…a life in which you’re mired in poverty, for example. That’s different from this feeling of “I have this one life to live, and I have to actually figure out what that means.”
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
What does it mean?
Rachel Louise Snyder
I’m getting a little older and more tired now, but for me it means going out into the world, interacting in a real way with everything, asking, “Why? Why do they do that? When I do this, why do I do this?” For me, it was also realizing that I wanted to live a life that had some purpose. I wanted to do something good.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
In the book, you asked, “What good was a magazine story if it didn’t compel change?” It made me wonder whether a memoir can compel change. How does a memoir create good?
Rachel Louise Snyder
A memoir can make sense of a world in which we feel alone. I have felt that reading memoirs that speak to my experience, like Educated or The Glass Castle. But all art can do that.
We change through story. To change a culture takes story. So that’s another thing that memoir can do. You could read my memoir and say, “Oh wow, there’s homeless kids all over the place that we’re not reaching,” or “Wow, the patriarchy goes deep and needs to be challenged.” Another of the things I do in my memoir—which I don’t think happens a lot, particularly in memoirs of troubled families like mine— is create a real arc of forgiveness and love.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Let’s talk about that arc. You have so many stories from your international travel and adventures. Multiple times in the book you rattle off a list of events from your life, and each could be its own essay! Could you talk about how you decided what to expand and what to condense? How did you arrive at the broader structure?
Rachel Louise Snyder
Things continued to happen [after the events in the book] that you would think I would include. My father died. I got breast cancer. In the book, my father—who arguably had a much bigger presence in my life—takes a back seat to my mothers: my real mother and my stepmother. That was crafted. Memoir is crafted.
In some ways, I’ve been writing this story for decades. This past weekend I was in Boston with the writer Andre Dubus, who wrote House of Sand and Fog. He was my professor. He finished reading an advance copy of my memoir, and he was like, “I remember this specific story from your fiction class.” I think it was the story on the playground where I get in a fistfight with my stepmother. So, in a sense, I’ve been writing these stories about what it’s like to lose a mother for 40 years. The structure always comes to me after I’m deep into the writing.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
I loved the scene when you made your first attempt to write about losing your mom. Afterwards, you raced to your friend Cindy’s house in the middle of the night so that you could read the piece to her. It made me cry, and also wonder how your life would’ve been different if you hadn’t been able to share that piece at that moment. Would it have mattered? Did it matter that you read it specifically to Cindy?
Rachel Louise Snyder
For me, that moment was less about the sharing and more about this mind-body unity. It was the first time I felt writing in a physical sense. I could feel the power of it. I was crying as I wrote it. I knew I was getting at something that was “capital T True.” I was writing something that was reaching into the very core of my being. I could feel it in my body. That’s a feeling I’ve chased in my writing ever since.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
You still get there?
Rachel Louise Snyder
Yeah, I do still get there. It happened with the last line of this memoir. I’m writing about my stepmother, and me, and these conversations, and I’m searching for the place that it wants to end. That last line came to me like a gut punch.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
The process sounds somewhat passive, like you’re receiving it rather than constructing it. What can a writer do to be more receptive to that kind of truth?
Rachel Louise Snyder
I do feel more like I’m channeling something. I don’t know if what I do would work for everybody, but first of all, I handwrite still. Because I have an inner nine-year-old, I handwrite in a different color every day. Then when I start, I’ll type in what I’ve written the day before, print it out, write on the back of that. You can’t be as fast at handwriting, so it makes you more deliberate about your language. There’s a revision that happens naturally the first time I type it in.
I also read a lot of poetry. I think poetry makes everybody a better writer no matter what your genre is, whether you’re a beat reporter, or a historian, or whatever.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Are there any texts —prose or poetry—that helped you shape Women We Buried, Women We Burned?
Rachel Louise Snyder
I think Educated did. I did a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Educated and wrote it on this big whiteboard to figure out the structure of it beyond chronology. I was looking for the primary topic or primary action of each character in each chapter, so I could see how the narrative moved.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
I haven’t read Educated, but I do feel like it’s common to write memoirs about people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. We like narratives of overcoming, of an individual person who triumphs over hardship and succeeds in the world on their own.
Rachel Louise Snyder
Yes. That’s Bullshit.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
In your memoir, you are independent and brave and strong, but/and there’s such an awareness of all the people who made you who you are today, many repeated reminders of connectedness.
Rachel Louise Snyder
When Obama was president, he gave this speech where he said, “You didn’t build that bridge, that road. You didn’t lay that.” I am totally with him. It’s really a myth in America that we are all individuals and we are all responsible for our own. There’s very little that is fully independent of others in our lives. We would be a stronger society and a stronger culture if we could admit to some of that. What if we had a culture and a society that said, ‘”I need help. Can you help me? I can’t get out of bed. Can you come compel me to go on a walk?” That makes stronger communities because it makes stronger people.
Brianna Avenia-Tapper
Do you think that living in Asia—which you write about in the book— made you more aware of that interdependence?
Rachel Louise Snyder
Yeah. I could point to things in their culture that are broken too, don’t get me wrong, but their families are really connected. Nobody is sitting there trying to raise a baby entirely alone.
One of my favorite anecdotes is: the garment workers in Cambodia wanted to have a sweat-shop-free environment, so they built this industry based on French labor laws. For factories over a certain number of people, they have to have a daycare in them.
And then they realized a few years in: women are not using our daycare. There’s no kids here. Because of course! They were all being raised by their families. That’s one of my favorite anecdotes. We would have a much stronger society if we could forego the myth of the individual a little bit.
MEMOIR
Women We Buried, Women We Burned
By Rachel Louise Snyder
Bloomsbury Publishing
Published May 23, 2023
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