A Life Built from Ruin

 March 2025 DABS Book Club Pick

Women We Buried, Women We Burned: A Memoir by Rachel Louise Snyder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This memoir reads like a series of miracles... not the kind preached in her abusive Evangelical upbringing, but the messy, improbable miracles of a life that shouldn’t have worked out, yet somehow did. From her chaotic childhood under the thumb of religious extremism to her unmoored teenage years (where her behavior, equal parts tragic and darkly hilarious, was clearly the product of unprocessed trauma), the author’s story is packed with so many WTF moments that you’ll find yourself rereading passages just to make sure you didn’t hallucinate them. The adults around her oscillate between neglectful and monstrous, and yet her writing never descends into self-pity. Instead, it’s sharp, darkly funny, and ruthlessly observant. That she emerged as a successful journalist (let alone a functional human) feels like a minor cosmic oversight in the best way.

If the first half of the book is about surviving her upbringing, the second half shows her learning to document other people's survival stories: from natural disasters to domestic violence crises. While I appreciated this thematic parallel, the pivot between these sections felt abrupt, like two different books shoved between the same covers. The throughline of her mother's death helps, but I wanted more connective tissue showing how her personal trauma shaped her professional lens. Still, even with this structural wobble, the memoir remains compulsively readable. It's the literary equivalent of watching someone build a life from scraps: messy, imperfect, but undeniably impressive.

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