Women We Buried, Women We Burned

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.

Reviews

‘[Snyder’s] background as a journalist shines through as she describes her experiences honestly but without added drama or artifice, instead letting the people and events speak for themselves. This results in a narrative whose style belies its depth, for even as Rachel recounts her own maturation as a woman and a writer, she’s also commenting obliquely on how trauma is recapitulated and the countless ways in which male authority warps and erases women’s stories and lived realities. How she undertakes this work is subtle, even crafty.’