A Wild Whatever in “Women We Buried, Women We Burned” https://ift.tt/pzmx8Qy
Reading Rachel Louise Snyder’s Women We Buried, Women We Burned, initially published in 2023 and recently made available in paperback, brought to my mind Anderson Cooper’s interview with Stephen Colbert in 2019. The subject of the interview was grief, at least in part, and Cooper, who, like Colbert, lost his father when he was 10, said of his loss: “It changed the trajectory of my life. I’m a different person than I feel like I was meant to be.”
It’s a profound and affecting conversation. I don’t doubt that Snyder, if she watched it, could see her own experience in it. Her life, too, was derailed by the loss of a parent at a young age — her mother passed away from cancer when Snyder was just eight years old. Perhaps Snyder, too, became a different person than she was meant to be.
But who she became — and how she became who she became — is worth reading about. Her memoir is beautiful. Astounding even. It’s a tale about loss, about grief and its reverberations, and about the vulnerability of children and of girls in particular. But it’s also about a way through. It’s about a re-making.
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. A 2020-2021 Guggenheim Fellow, she is a professor of creative writing and journalism at American University in Washington, D.C.
Snyder begins with her mother’s death in 1977. She describes how, after her mother died, her bereaved father remarried and moved their family from Pennsylvania to Illinois, where he joined a newly formed Evangelical church run by Snyder’s aunt and uncle and where he insisted that Snyder call her new stepmother, Barbara, “Mom.” Snyder attended school at the Faith Center Christian Academy, where religious indoctrination and the Christianity-laced authoritarianism practiced at home by her father piled on additional harm. Lost, grieving, angry, Snyder rebelled.
Her adolescence was a spiraling out of control and included verbal and physical abuse, drug abuse, sexual assault, academic expulsion, and, eventually, when her father kicked her out of the house, homelessness at the age of 16. The years she should have spent in high school were spent instead working and finding service jobs, scrounging for money, and trying to find something to eat or a place to sleep at night. A safe space. A few years into this rootless time, she did a stint at the modeling school Barbizon and booked gigs for a heavy metal band called White Lie.
As I read, I asked myself, how does a child survive this? How does she overcome? For Snyder, there seemed to be some calculus of innate talent and the intervention of a few well-meaning people who were paying attention. Snyder’s grandmother Erma, for example, stood up to her father and made an impression on young Rachel. A boyfriend, Frank Pappalardo, told her she needed to get her GED and go to college, something she hadn’t considered seriously before. Her friend Cindy, a hand to her mouth, listened, rapt, to Snyder read her first-ever personal essay. And Snyder’s Uncle Robert paid half the tuition of a life-changing Semester at Sea program, making it possible for her to go.
It was on that trip that Snyder felt the stirrings of “something like a future”: “I called it a wild whatever. Possibility. It was delicate… I sensed the ship was a way to forge that future. To create a life in which I had something to lose.”
Eventually, Snyder graduated from college and from graduate school, traveled to the far corners of the world, and worked as a journalist pitching and writing stories about genocide, natural disasters, the horrors endured mostly by girls and women. Writing for her was an “empathic exercise in which to examine the complexities and seeming contradictions of people,” including those in her own father and stepmother. “Far from being paradoxical,” she writes, “I eventually understood that we all embody these extremes.”
Some of her most moving passages appear in the final chapters of the memoir, as she makes a home in Cambodia. As she bears witness to the lives and trials of others. As she gives birth to a daughter and determines to “free herself” from the burden of seeing her past through the lens her parents had chosen. As she comforts another mother, her stepmother Barbara, in the process of dying from cancer. As she “learns to live as a woman shaped by intention rather than loss.”
This memoir should not be missed. As Snyder finds hope or possibility — that wild whatever — in the receding darkness, so, too, I think, might we all.
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