Women Unearthed, Women at the Root

A Book Review of Rachel Lousie Snyder‘s Women We Buried, Women We Burned

by Camilia Cenek

Women–especially mothers–are at the root. Even–and especially–when they are dead, absent, or abused. Rachel Louise Snyder’s Women We Buried, Women We Burned beautifully evokes both the particular and the universal struggles of women who become, or desperately need, mothers. The memoir’s cascading disasters are first set off by the early loss of the author’s mother, an event which of itself is catastrophic but which triggers further collapses that could hardly have been imagined by then eight-year-old Snyder or her remaining family.

Snyder burns through her tormented teen years, rages down a treacherous path through violence, drugs, and trouble. Though her travails are extreme, in some ways they ring familiar to the reader who once also torched rules and reason as a teen. Through the crucible of suffering and abandonment, Snyder tests her mettle, walks through flames, and emerges smoldering but cleansed on the other side. Improbably, she discovers the transformative opportunities of education. Of discovery. Of spirituality. Later, midway through a sea voyage around the globe, where she finds herself straddling the two halves of the earth, Snyder reaches her inflection point:

“Be open. Be flexible. Move like the sea grass. There are no plans, only ideas.”

Snyder’s friends and classmates model these values which she sorely needs. For the first time, Snyder is introduced to the idea that the death of her mother, while undeserved, also offered a lesson in how to live. Curiosity, tenacity, and generosity of spirit, Snyder discovers, can be and often are the byproducts born from loss. In this moment, she opens a great gift bestowed by her mother, unknowingly stewarded by her friends. From here Snyder passes from one hemisphere to another, entering a second segment of her life. There she finds the power to author a new script for her developing story.

She travels. She enters deeply into the stories of mothers and cultures around the world, where she finds pain, cruelty, unimaginable hardship–and resilience. The stories of women the world over are unique. The stories of women the world over are the same.

Later in the middle zone of Snyder’s life and book, she herself becomes a mother. Readers (including myself) who have become mothers after losing mothers will know well the profound mystery of re-entering the mother-child relationship, this time from the other side. In that space there is joy, there is terror. There is the burden of avoiding one’s own death in order to prevent the repetition of the mother-loss cycle–and the knowledge that no matter what one does, such a risk can never be contained.

Snyder traces the cycle of her growth, the circle of her life, and gently, brilliantly, deposits the reader back where we started. The memoir culminates with the author’s ultimate wisdom: mourn the mothers that you lose; keep the mothers that you have. The substitutes, the surrogates. The unexpected stand-ins. Specifically, the stepmother that Snyder long rejected. As her stepmother approaches the end of her own life, Snyder once again faces undeserved pain and loss, both parallel and perpendicular to the mother-death story that she survived before. Parallel in its eerie similarities. Perpendicular in the profound shift of perspective, power, and personhood. This time, Snyder is ready. This time, Snyder can speak. In perhaps the most pivotal moment of the book, she calls her stepmother “Mom” for the first time. She asks her stepmother questions, tells her stories, discovers truths that had long been buried. Unearthing the pain stings–and heals.

Together they participate in the essential, crucial maternal exchange: the real economy of humanity. The foundation. Women, their daughters, and their stories.