Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir

Acclaimed author of No Visible Bruises Rachel Louise Snyder's piercing account of her journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of domestic violence.

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, suppressing the painful memory of her mother's early death, and the drastic changes that loss wrought on her family and the course of her life. Snyder's powerful new memoir relates her personal history with honesty, lyricism, and an eternal eye to the social issues that have become her life's work.

Snyder was eight years old 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. As a reporter, survival became her beat. 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.