Women We Buried, Women We Burned

Rachel Louise Snyder's memoir traces her life from a childhood shattered by her mother's death through years of abuse, homelessness, and self-destruction, toward an adulthood shaped by education, travel, and a hard-won reckoning with family. The book opens aboard a ship during a college program called Semester at Sea, where Rachel watches the sky split in half at dawn along a line called the Terminator, separating night from day. She identifies this moment as her origin story, a visual marker of her transformation from someone living out of her car into a person who dared to imagine a future.

The memoir returns to October 1977, when eight-year-old Rachel and her older brother David came home from school in Moon Township, a suburb of Pittsburgh, to find a parked ambulance in their driveway. Their mother, Gail, had breast cancer but had been declared cancer-free just two weeks earlier. Rachel peered through her mother's cracked bedroom door and prayed, but Gail died gasping, her last words "I can't breathe, I can't breathe" (8). Rachel's father, Dick Snyder, a salesman at International Business Machines (IBM), was not present. He told the children their mother had gone to be with the Lord and broke down wailing. Rachel did not cry privately but learned to perform grief after observing how adults responded to a child's sniffles.

Dick struggled as a sole parent. Karen Jones, Dick's girlfriend from church, became the most important woman in Rachel's life, teaching her the basics of womanhood. That stability ended when Dick, who had converted to Judaism to marry Gail, became immersed in born-again evangelical Christianity at a revival camp in Illinois. There he met Barbara (Barb), a divorced factory worker and single mother of two, Holly and Aaron. Without mentioning Barbara, he told Rachel they were moving. She begged to stay, but Dick refused.

Dick married Barbara shortly after. In the church basement, he introduced Rachel to Barb by saying "meet your new mother" (30). Rachel sobbed through the ceremony. The blended family was volatile: Rachel could not call Barb "Mom" and wandered the house to find her rather than calling out. The cultural shifts were jarring, as Gail's gourmet Jewish cooking gave way to casseroles, powdered milk, and food stamps.

Rachel attended Faith Center Christian Academy (FCCA), a tiny school her aunt and uncle ran, where students worked alone in cubicles and secular entertainment was banned. The evangelical film A Thief in the Night, depicting the Rapture, the belief that true Christians will be bodily taken to heaven at the end of the world, terrified Rachel with the possibility that her Jewish relatives were destined for hell. She attempted to convert her grandmother Erma, who refused and furiously called Dick, the only person Rachel ever saw stand up to her father.

At home, discipline escalated into violence. When Rachel screamed "Barbara!" instead of "Mom," Dick slapped her across the face for the first time. Spankings became formalized rituals using a wooden paddle from Gail's college sorority, preceded by lengthy Bible readings and resulting in welts. At 12, Rachel packed a suitcase and roller-skated to a neighbor's house, but returned when Barb told her "God told me you ran away" (68) and promised not to tell Dick. At 15, Rachel stood and faced her father during a spanking, refusing to bend over. The paddle broke on her body. She kicked back and accidentally struck her pregnant stepmother.

FCCA closed, and Rachel started at Naperville North High School. She found community among the "burnout" kids, befriended Cindy Landorf, who became her lifelong best friend, and failed nearly every class. Holly's boyfriend Jackson began sneaking Rachel out to parties. One night he forced himself on her while she lay frozen. She was 14, had received no sexual education, and he left her bruised and bleeding. She told no one. Her guidance counselor, Bob Martin, became her advocate after Dick beat her severely, leaving multicolored bruises on her thighs. Bob reported the abuse to child protective services, which determined the violence did not warrant removal.

Dick distributed a typed document titled "TIME FOR A CHANGE" listing new family rules, including one line acknowledging "No child or parent abuse (verbal or physical)" (107). When Rachel missed curfew after Holly had a minor car accident, Dick locked the children out and the next morning placed four empty suitcases in the entryway. Rachel, 16, picked the most colorful one and left.

She spent the next years sleeping on couches, in her car, and in unstable apartments, working multiple minimum-wage jobs. She bluffed her way into booking a band called White Lie at a nightclub and created "Midwest Artist Management," cold-calling clubs across the region. Frank Pappalardo, a recording engineer who became her boyfriend and mentor, delivered the challenge that changed her trajectory: She needed to go to college or she would "be a loser for the rest of your life" (159).

Rachel passed the General Educational Development (GED) exam, and Frank arranged a meeting with Rick Spencer, head of admissions at North Central College in Naperville, who agreed to take a chance on her. At North Central, Rachel thrived, discovering Harlem Renaissance literature and writing a deeply personal essay about her mother's death. Her uncle Robert, Erma's brother, offered to fund half of Semester at Sea. Despite deep fear, Rachel sailed around the world, visiting Japan, China, India, Kenya, South Africa, and Brazil.

After graduate school, Rachel became a freelance journalist. In 2003, she moved to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with Paul, a retired British commando she met while training for an assignment in Afghanistan. She reported on the Khmer Rouge war crimes tribunal, Cambodia's garment industry, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Living near Tuol Sleng, Phnom Penh's genocide museum, she learned about Cambodian spiritual beliefs and began visiting Buddhist pagodas. One afternoon, she sensed her mother's presence and asked whether she should have a child. Her mother answered that even if she were alive, she could not help with that decision, freeing Rachel from the belief that her mother's death had left her permanently deficient.

At 39, Rachel gave birth to her daughter, Eliana Jazz, by emergency C-section in Bangkok. Holding her newborn, she realized her parents, not she, bore primary responsibility for her childhood: "No. You were the adults. I was the child" (224). After six years in Cambodia, she and Paul moved to Washington, DC, for a professorship at American University.

The memoir's final section follows Rachel's deepening relationship with Barb as Barb battles stage-four colorectal cancer in Arizona. Over multiple visits, they developed an intimacy they had never shared. Barb described cancer as inhabiting a body no longer hers and revealed that her first husband had held a gun to her head. Rachel told Barb the hardest truth: "When I was a teenager, Mom, all I wanted was for you to die. And now all I want is for you to live" (245). Barb told Rachel she could see Jesus and her guardian angel at her bedside. Rachel, who had felt her own mother's ghost in Cambodia, believed her. She understood that Barb was telling not a story about God but a love story, and Rachel was part of it.