Author, professor, and New York Times op-ed contributing writer, Rachel Louise Snyder, joins us for a raw and honest discussion about child abuse, domestic violence, and grief as laid bare in her gripping memoir, "Women We Buried, Women We Burned." To quote the author, "Cancer took my mother. But religion would take my life." The odyssey begins as an 8-year-old Rachel learns her mother has died. From there, her childhood unravels, and the subsequent decades include chaotic experiences of upheaval, abuse, and forced religiosity all leading to both the author's undoing and her ultimate journey of self-discovery.
In this candid look at the author's own experiences, we explore both the darkness that abuse casts, and the light of understanding and transformation that can emerge from such depths. Our conversation weaves through the entanglement of love and abuse, reflecting on the complexities that many survivors face — the dichotomy of endearing and harmful qualities within relationships that often go unseen by the public eye. Rachel also takes us through the harrowing systemic challenges that victims face, from law enforcement's response to the judicial system's handling of their plight.
Rachel's story is not just one of sorrow but also of evolution and rediscovery. From her early days as a rebellious teen to her transformative experiences in the cultural melting pot of Cambodia, her journey is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. As an advocate for domestic violence survivors, she illuminates the importance of community support and the essential services provided by organizations like Genesis Women's Shelter & Support. By telling the story of her life, Rachel Louise Snyder offers a dialogue where hope persists amidst adversity, and where the sharing of one's narrative can be both an act of courage and a beacon for change.
Author, professor, and New York Times op-ed contributing writer, Rachel Louise Snyder, joins us for a raw and honest discussion about child abuse, domestic violence, and grief as laid bare in her gripping memoir, "Women We Buried, Women We Burned." To quote the author, "Cancer took my mother. But religion would take my life." The odyssey begins as an 8-year-old Rachel learns her mother has died. From there, her childhood unravels, and the subsequent decades include chaotic experiences of upheaval, abuse, and forced religiosity all leading to both the author's undoing and her ultimate journey of self-discovery.
In this candid look at the author's own experiences, we explore both the darkness that abuse casts, and the light of understanding and transformation that can emerge from such depths. Our conversation weaves through the entanglement of love and abuse, reflecting on the complexities that many survivors face — the dichotomy of endearing and harmful qualities within relationships that often go unseen by the public eye. Rachel also takes us through the harrowing systemic challenges that victims face, from law enforcement's response to the judicial system's handling of their plight.
Rachel's story is not just one of sorrow but also of evolution and rediscovery. From her early days as a rebellious teen to her transformative experiences in the cultural melting pot of Cambodia, her journey is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. As an advocate for domestic violence survivors, she illuminates the importance of community support and the essential services provided by organizations like Genesis Women's Shelter & Support. By telling the story of her life, Rachel Louise Snyder offers a dialogue where hope persists amidst adversity, and where the sharing of one's narrative can be both an act of courage and a beacon for change.
Author Rachel Louise Snyder is here to talk about her memoir Women we Buried, women we Burned. I'm Maria McMullen and this is Genesis, the podcast. I first met Rachel Louise Snyder in 2020. In fact, she was one of the first guests I interviewed for our sister show, the Podcast on Crimes Against Women. In our first conversation, we talked about her book no Visible Bruises that had been released just months prior. This year, 2023, rachel Louise Snyder published a new book, a Memoir that lays bare the author's own experiences of abuse, violence, grief and addiction.
Maria MacMullin:Before we get started, I hope you will take care of yourself while listening to this episode. The topics are heavy the journey and odyssey so if, at any time, you need to pause and take some time away from this conversation, you should do what you need to do and come back when you're ready. I learned a lot from Rachel Louise Snyder by reading her memoir. It wasn't just the details or what I did not know about her life story. It was about how those details shaped her. It was about the people who inspired her and believed in her at the times when she could not believe in herself. About what grief and loss take from our lives, but also about what they give to us. But most of all, I learned that there is always more to the story, because we have all survived something.
Maria MacMullin:Rachel, welcome to the podcast. Hi Maria, I'm really happy to see you again and that we could make time to talk about your memoir. I did read your memoir. I was just. I fell to every slap. I mean, I really did. I really thought it was one of the most interesting, well-written memoirs I've read recently and I really appreciate it. I appreciate your authenticity and your honesty and telling the story, because I would have to guess it was very hard to do and the title was interesting too. It took me a minute to understand, but it's like a metaphor, right.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, it is metaphor, I don't know. It's the first book where the title came to me first, before I mean not before I started writing, but sort of very early in the process, and it just struck me as a way in which what I was learning about is I was going around the world about the patriarchy and the people who paid the price for the policies of the patriarchy were women. Women and children, and it also just from a writing standpoint. It also had this rhythm and alliteration and imagery that I feel like the best titles should aspire to. Yeah.
Maria MacMullin:I thought it was a very intriguing title and I'm wondering when the Netflix series is going to be.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yes, I'm also wondering.
Maria MacMullin:This has Netflix original.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yes, yes, I believe me. I would love to know that as well. I have had a few meetings. As they say in Hollywood, you take a meeting, but meetings are, you know a diamond.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, and I also think you know there's more and more of these types of stories about abuse and violence being produced in what do they call it? In a series or in movies, and I think it's a good thing. You know we can't really talk about it enough because we're still not getting the attention that we need to get around violence against women, child abuse and other things.
Rachel Louise Snyder:And the nuance I mean. The thing is like. You probably know this better than I do, but for decades our only reference was the burning bed, because there just wasn't other material that grappled with the situation as in a nuanced way.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, and the burning bed. I mean we're going back, but 40 years on that.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, exactly Now. You know, I think Maid has done a good job in sort of showing the nuance of domestic violence. I mean, I just think there's an array of turn to remember now the one with Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, and Was that Big Little Lies? Yeah, yes, big Little Lies. Yeah, that was another one.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, and I think it's still, but it's still happening and we can never talk about it enough, right? There's always more to learn and there are so many survivors who don't write fully, so tell their story if they don't want to, but you've written a lot. You've written a novel, nonfiction works, numerous articles over the year. Why publish a memoir and why now?
Rachel Louise Snyder:Part of it was just practicality. During COVID, I needed something to do. Yeah, good thing to do. No, that's. The truth is I always knew that I had an interesting story to tell. It's not just the abuse that happened in my life, it's all the things that came later. I'm sorry if you hear my new little puppy in her collar jangling in the background.
Maria MacMullin:We love pets. We love pets on Jengling.
Rachel Louise Snyder:She can't be stilled. It's funny, anyway. So I always knew I had a story, but I didn't. For starters, I wanted to establish myself as a writer first. I think it's very difficult in the world, the literary world, when you come out of the gate with a memoir, you become that story in some sense, and then everybody wants you that's what you end up writing, and I didn't. So just from a practical standpoint, I didn't want to be relegated in that way. But I also now understand that I just needed the years to bring some sort of meaning to what was happening.
Rachel Louise Snyder:The best memoirs, the best writing really is there's the story that you're reading on the page, but there's also the author in the background through making sense of it. And I don't think that I could really look back on, for example, my father and some of the decisions he made for many decades. I couldn't look back with a sense of fullness, a sense of empathy Okay, what was, what was he up against that he had trouble overcoming, right? Like I'd spent decades thinking about that with myself, but it took me this long to kind of think about it with my father, and I also think this is a long answer. But I also think that the book is in conversation. I think women we buried, women we burned is in conversation, with no physical bruises. And I think that book established me, as you know, a journalist who looks at the issue of domestic abuse or intimate partner, terrorism from a full lens, right Lots of different angles, and so I think this time I just sort of turned that lens on myself.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point because I've read no Visible Bruises and we talked about that on podcast on crimes against women several years ago and at that time I would have had no idea that your own story of abuse and kind of the intersection with domestic violence that we talk about in this book as well. I didn't realize how real all of that actually was for you within writing no Visible Bruises, and so I appreciate the gift of this memoir and it's a very public way to kind of heal from experiences of abuse. Did you intend to use this as kind of a cathartic experience writing this memoir, or was it something else?
Rachel Louise Snyder:It's funny. I have always resisted the idea of writing as catharsis because in my mind it was like, no, no, no, writing is my job and this is not therapy. Right, there was a way in which I wanted to separate those two things out. But if getting older does anything for you, it teaches you humility. Yes, yes. And so it was cathartic to write this in a way that makes me still even slightly uncomfortable, like I don't want to think of writing as cathartic. I want to think of therapy as cathartic or meditation as cathartic, but it was pretty cathartic.
Rachel Louise Snyder:And the thing is, my father died, which is not in the book, but he died right at the start of COVID and he knew that I would write a memoir. I've written a version of this many times over the last 30 years and thrown them all away, lots and lots of drafts. So he knew that that was coming, and his response actually was Rach, you just write the story that you feel you lived. You write the truth as you feel you lived it. So he had grown to and expanded, and we were really close by the time he died, actually, and so, in a funny way, this brought him back to me during those very early months of his after his death. He died really quickly too. He was diagnosed with cancer, and then he died two weeks later.
Speaker 3:How many Two?
Rachel Louise Snyder:weeks a day. So it was really I just had no preparation. Not that you can prepare for that, anyway, but it just was like he was here and we had all these plans and then he was gone and I have a lot of dreams about him and I miss him a lot, even though he was terrible to me when I was a kid he was awful. I was awful too. We were awful to each other.
Maria MacMullin:Well, yeah and I mean having read your story it's hard for me to even comprehend missing him, based on everything that you shared in the memoir. But it is your story and it's amazing how much you grew throughout the course of that book even just the way that you talked about your childhood experience to your very adult experiences with your father and with his wife, your stepmother Barb and I want to skip to that part of the book which is really close to the end, because it's a part where your stepmother reveals something to you at the end of the book when she's dying from cancer. Can you tell us about Barb's experience of domestic violence and how that influenced your own story?
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, my father is the one who actually told me about her experience of domestic violence, and I'll answer that. But I actually just want to get back to my dad for one quick second, like how could I miss him? How could I love him? The thing is, of course, like all abuse victims, we have a much fuller picture of the person who is abusing us. Right, we have the terrible images, but we also have these absolute, hilarious or beautiful or touching images, and I think it's one of the things that we don't, that we have blinders on when we think about domestic violence. It's embedded in the question why doesn't she just leave?
Rachel Louise Snyder:The expectation is that love shouldn't or doesn't play a part in that relationship, and that's what makes domestic abuse so intractable, in fact, is because often you do love this person who is abusing you. You just want the abuse to stop. There is a movement around the acknowledgement of that, I think, today in the domestic violence community like, okay, how do we support this victim? How can we make the abuse stop? They don't want the relationship to end, and the problem with seeing it as abuse separate from love is that it has this knock on effect with all of our systems. The police then think the victim is crazy. The judiciary then says, oh well, they drop the charges because they want to stay together or whatever. It has this our inability to see a relationship more fully and see why somebody might want to stay beyond just I don't know the financial aspects or the coercion right. Maybe they do actually love this person. They just want the abuse to stop. I think it's something that we need to include in our conversation a little bit.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I'm happy to talk more about that later, but I just wanted to say that my dad was a lot of things. He was abusive when I was a teenager. He was also charming and funny and was like the greatest storyteller I know and all of my humor I get from my father and I look like my father. I don't look at all like my mother, which disappoints me a little bit. So I just wanted to say that we can get back to that later. But my stepmother yes, the question about my stepmother, as she was in hospice she was in hospice for about two months. My father told me that he learned pretty early on that she had been abused by her first husband and her first husband she got pregnant at 16 and dropped out of school because that's what you did in the 60s, you didn't carry the shame of that pregnancy visually and she married him. His name was Ron and I actually ended up having two kids by him my step sister and stepbrother and she divorced him at some point I'm not sure how she was Maybe 20, pretty young still but he had been very abusive and he had held a gun to her head and both of them my dad and stepmother knew that I was writing no Visible Bruises in the middle of that.
Rachel Louise Snyder:No Visible Bruises took me about eight years, and so I was. I think I was in edits or something. I'm not sure what, where exactly I was. But I went into her hospice room and asked her. I said dad just told me about Ron. I had no idea. And here I had been, you know, researching domestic abuse for a decade or something. At that point and she she kind of nodded, she was very, very weak and she said oh right, I just don't, I just don't want to go back there.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I just don't want to talk about that. And I decided that afternoon that I was going to dedicate no visible bruises to her because you know, I don't know, I hadn't made the space for her to share that maybe or she had with so many decades past that abuse and my father, I have to say, was never, ever abusive toward her. They had a rough relationship in the first five years but after all of us kids were gone they came to really have like a wonderful relationship and in the last years that they had to get, their last 15 years or so, they were. You'd think that they were like a new, a newlywed couple in love. So I decided I would dedicate no visible bruises to her because her story was such a symbol of the kinds of stories I was researching, where there was so much shame and so much pain involved in the discussion, that you just didn't talk about it and that's kind of too bad, you know.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, and it's similar to when people experience child abuse and they don't talk about it, don't think about it, and some of the things you just said reminded me of a quote I've seen where you know, when you abuse a child, it doesn't cause them to stop loving you, the abusive parent, it causes them to stop loving themselves, and you can see that in the pages of your book.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Oh, my God, I feel that. I felt that I've never heard that before. I feel that in my gut, what you just said, well yeah and I think that that is.
Maria MacMullin:It's all over the pages of your book and I could not stop thinking about that quote.
Maria MacMullin:I can't tell you who wrote it or where I even saw it, but I find it to be very true and that hatred that a child has for themselves, because most often victims of child abuse are blaming themselves for what's happening to them when it isn't their fault.
Maria MacMullin:And so it's really evident in the way that you describe still caring for your father and loving your father and having a relationship with him as an adult that was not abusive, I assume. Yeah, yeah, we can't get away from the fact that there were years of abuse that you experienced from him, really in the name of religion and obedience towards a set of rules that were enforced upon you, and I wanna come back to that idea. But I also wanna say one other thing, because when I first started reading the book, this word stood out for me like in glaring big letters, and that word was reckoning, because I could feel a reckoning for you coming in the beginning of the book, and when we get about 80% through the book, that reckoning is revealed. So let's talk about how you came to terms with the abuse you experienced as a child and how it helped to heal that trauma.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, that's you know. It's almost embarrassing for me to say, but I'll tell you this quick anecdote. So the abuse in my family was very situational, by which I mean there was no abuse before my mother died, when I was eight. I mean, okay, we had some spankings with the wooden spoon, but it was the 70s. Everybody did that right.
Maria MacMullin:Whatever do you mean?
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, so, but what I mean by abuse is it was after she died and my father married my stepmother and they got very religious and we would have these long drawn out sessions of punishments with my mother's sorority paddle, my real mother's sorority paddle, and then eventually it just when I started to fight back around age 14, I started to physically fight back and then it became, I think, much more heightened.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Right, my father slapped me. My father, you know, threw me up against the wall, but it was not the abuse. I make a distinction between the abuse that happened when I was a kid and the abuse that I see in a grown relationship. That is situational or trying to control, like my father was trying to control me because he didn't have any kind of range of other options. I think, right, like I was, I did run away all the time, I did do a lot of drugs, I came home wasted, I blew off school, I was eventually expelled from school, so there was an escalation that was happening, whereas I think with a lot of adult abuse victims, they just sort of cave in word and they lose their sense of self right, they lose their power and the abuse becomes very habitual. As opposed to situational, right, like we're in this kind of moment.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Once I left the house I was 16 when I left it wasn't like that abuse continued, I mean it just sort of stopped. And then my father didn't really have. He never really targeted the other kids the way he did me. I targeted is not quite the right word, because the other kids didn't do what I did. The other kids didn't. None of them blew off school, none of them ran away. None of them fought back when they got spanked. I did all of those things. So you know there was this.
Rachel Louise Snyder:It was between me and my father, but I was on the book tour for this and I was in Chicago and a woman named Carla Fisher, who is maybe many of your listeners know her. She's an incredible domestic violence advocate and attorney in Illinois. She's been a source for me on many stories and we were. I went out for dinner after my event and I looked at her and said I have to ask you, do you think I was a victim of abuse like domestic violence? And this is again like? This is six months ago this is not while I was even writing this book and she was like.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I mean, she was like, of course I do, of course, even the writing of this book, I hadn't thought of myself in that same category, as someone who marries an abuser. I mean, that's how difficult it is. Someone like me who has spent years researching this, didn't identify as in this way, and I still I replay that moment again and again. I have to somehow come to some terms with myself that I went through a period of abuse Like it's crazy. It's crazy from a variety of angles, but the one thing I the benefit that I think I had was that I could look back on it. It didn't continue to happen in my life, and so I could look back on it and say wait a minute, that was not my fault and my father is not sharing responsibility for what was his fault.
Maria MacMullin:Yes.
Rachel Louise Snyder:The last Christmas I had with him, which was Christmas of 2018, he died a couple of days before Christmas in 2019, we went out on Christmas Eve morning. We went out for breakfast, just the two of us and he said to me this is now a year after my stepmother has died, he's despondent, he's just filled with grief, doesn't know what to do. And he said to me you know, rach, I think I was really unfair to you and David, my brother David, which you know we were the kids from his first marriage.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I think I was really unfair to the two of you because I was afraid of being accused of favoritism, and that is the closest he ever came to apologizing. That's not an apology Not an apology, but it does show the absolute control that the church had over him. Yeah, in the same way that he was trying to control his family and everyone around him, the church was coercively controlling him.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, there are many, many layers to this story, right, and we have not even touched on the fact that what really underlies a lot of this was the death of your mother when you were eight years old, because your mother died of cancer when you were eight years old and then, much later, your stepmother also died of cancer, but in between, yeah, and your father died of cancer.
Maria MacMullin:But in between all of that, from what I read in the story, you were not given the opportunity you or David to really grieve the loss of your mother. It was a lot of change. It was very chaotic, tumultuous, even, where she is ill for many years and then she dies and you didn't really understand what even happened to her or that she might die. And then all of a sudden you are moving across the country and becoming an evangelical Christian with a whole new family to boot, and so that's a lot for anyone, but not the least of which for a child.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, I think my mother dying was, of course, the original trauma. She had been sick my whole life. In fact. You know, my memories of her are mostly her in bed and my brother and I were so shocked by her death because we just thought oh, she's just sick, she's just going to be sick forever. I didn't even know she had cancer. My brother did know because he was a year older and he just he knew more. I didn't even know she had died from cancer for a few years. I don't even know how I learned she died from breast cancer. You know, like one day just sort of dawned on me or something. But that was the original trauma.
Rachel Louise Snyder:But my mother had been very strict. She grew up, you know, she was from a New England Jewish family, so she had a bit of the blue blood about her. She made me wear dresses to school. I wanted to be a tomboy. There were a lot of ways that she was controlling in her own way as well, and so when she died, my brother and I had this like two year gap of total freedom my dad's off at work, we're latchkey kids, we're coming home, we're like just playing kickball and four squared. It was my brother and I have talked about that as, like the, we felt so guilty that we were so happy in those first two years. And then my father gets married and moves us across the country, all in a two month period and that to me, looking back on that, in some ways it's the bigger trauma. Because he had a choice. My mother had no choice, right, and so he was making a bad decision.
Rachel Louise Snyder:And it really was my giving birth to my own daughter. And you know, you have that moment in the hospital. You look at the beautiful face of your newborn that's you're meeting for the first time. I liken it to like someone you've had an email relationship, an intimate email relationship with nine months, but never seen. You're like, oh, that's what you look like. And I just looked at her and thought, oh my God, no, my parents did make a terrible decision. Oh my God, they were shitty parents. When I was younger, most people have the exact opposite moment, right, like, oh my God, I understand why my parents did the hard things they did, but for me it was this absolute freeing of like. You know what? You don't have to bear all this responsibility by yourself. You can share this blame.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, I was so proud of you. First of all, I'm proud of you for what it's worth, for writing this book. You're very, very courageous. But I was so proud of you in that moment because, yes, the burden should not be yours alone to bear.
Maria MacMullin:We cannot change the fact that the abuse occurred, but we you know survivors tend to reach a point when they do come to realize the abuse was not their fault. That child who hates themselves because they are being abused, because it must be their fault, that does reach a point, usually in life where, hey, someone did this to me. I didn't cause this to be done to me and despite anything that you feel you may have done to to really instigate abuse like you know, you had mentioned drugs and things like that those are more or less ways of acting out, because any attention would be good attention, even if it results in abuse, and so there's a whole psychology behind all of that. But suffice it to say I thought it was remarkable the way that you were able to tie things together toward the end of the book and realize that your father specifically never took responsibility for what was his fault in all of these things and not fully explaining the death of your mother in not allowing his children to grieve, and on and on.
Maria MacMullin:And so that in itself, I think, was you know, had to be a part in the book where, where I felt you had been liberated, you had, you know, reached a point where you were free from that demon, at least.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I think that's a good way to put it. I don't. I resist somewhat the idea of healing because I think, at least in this country and culture, it implies that you don't feel the pain anymore and that that is not true, even when you just said that phrase about you. Don't stop loving the person you stop loving yourself. Like you know, I could feel myself tearing up Right. The pain is always accessible.
Maria MacMullin:Because you can. You know you can still look back at your, your childhood self and remember who that that girl was. Yeah, and you know it's just wanting to go back and pick her up and hold her and be like this is going to be okay, this is going to end.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, I mean, in some ways, getting kicked out of the house at 16 was the best thing that ever happened to me, because, even though it's, it's galling and appalling when people hear it it freed me from that abuse and that coercive control. And it also freed me in a much more important and bigger way I would say maybe not more important but to see that I had been living subject to the lies of the church and the patriarchy, that in fact there were people out in the world who would and did take care of me and who would and did look out for me. You know people that had no responsibility for me at all waiters and waitresses and managers at a Mexican restaurant I worked at you know, initially they were.
Rachel Louise Snyder:They were the first, the first group, and yeah, I think, I think that I'm able to look back on that. You know, my father is is worth a book in and of himself. I have a whole box of stuff that I took when he died because I just was like, wow, he was a man of secrets. Holy smokes like crazy, like a 15 year correspondence with the IRS and all kinds of like interesting things that are left out of the book.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, okay, yeah, he broke back to him. You know it's like holy cow, but it was freeing to think about. I can define the world the way I want to define it, not the way you're going to define it for me, and I'm going to let my daughter define it the way she wants to define it, which includes, by the way, having a relationship with you, if she wants one, and she did have one. I mean, she unfortunately is. She doesn't have any grandparents left, which is really sad because she's only 15. But she and my dad were close, and so her memories of him are completely different than my memories, and I'm so glad I was able to give that to her. I think of it as a gift for her. It probably was a gift for him to. That doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is I gave this gift to her of love.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I didn't burden her with my burdens. I didn't put my burdens on to her, you know.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, I think that's really a remarkable gift to give to your child and that was really clear in the book. Like when you reach this turning point of like, hey, I'm, I'm letting go of this burden, I have this daughter, I have a whole new life, she has a whole life ahead of her. I have a whole new life ahead of me as a mother, and you wanted to do it the way that you wanted to raise her and be her parent the way that you wanted it to be done.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, there's a line in the bird I wanted the kind of parent you would have wanted. I'm the parent I wanted. Right, be the parent you always wanted. Yeah, there's your textbook title.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, be the parent you see in the world, or something.
Maria MacMullin:Be the parent you want to see in the world. There is a line in the book where you say cancer took my mother, but religion took my life, and we've been kind of talking all around that in this conversation about the experience of religion and what it caused, the pain that it caused you and your brother and your, your step siblings as well. What else can you tell us about that experience? And do you see the child abuse that you experienced as religious abuse or child abuse in the name of religion, or religious maltreatment of a child? How do you define that?
Rachel Louise Snyder:I think it certainly began as child abuse that was, you know, not only accepted but promoted and mandated from religion. Now let me just say that had all the Christians in my life and my circles been like Jimmy and Rosalind Carter, I probably would have had a very different different experience of religion.
Rachel Louise Snyder:But they were not and they were very strict, very conservative evangelicals who misquoted the Bible spare the rods, boil the child is an affirmation that is used over and over again that actually doesn't appear anywhere in the Bible.
Rachel Louise Snyder:But it's not just the abuse that I suffered, it's the way in which the church covered up the abuse that other people around me suffered and that I reached out to a cousin of mine not too long ago who was the one of the children of my aunt and uncle who ran the church and ran the school that was were dictating all these things to my parents and this cousin just took no responsibility at all, just took no like, was like I don't see my parents that way and I was like well, the problem continues then, yeah, I think I mean it's like it's, it's not unlike the Catholic church with the abuse of those children. And there's been no you know you use the word reckoning earlier. There's been no reckoning that I can really see. And in fact I think I heard somewhere that spanking is legal in legal to do in schools in a number of something like a dozen states.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, I've also read that, yeah.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, and I just I. That's something I'd like to write about. Actually, I just find that absolutely shocking. Like in 2023, as I sit here talking to you, spanking is legal and it is. It is always a spanking that comes from a religious point of view. There is no secular point of view that that that says spanking is an acceptable, you know, form of punishment.
Maria MacMullin:Right, because you know beating someone into submission really isn't accepted. It's immoral. In a lot of states it's illegal.
Rachel Louise Snyder:It's no different, honestly, it's no different than an authoritarian government torturing political prisoners.
Maria MacMullin:It's no different than domestic violence either, right? I mean, if you, if you wouldn't hit your spouse, why would you hit your child, which is the, you know, one of the things I struggled with in the book where your father, your stepmother, described your father as saintly and never laid a hand on her, never abused her physically, yet was abusing the children for the sake of upholding, you know, some religious values and a certain type of order, christian order, in the household.
Rachel Louise Snyder:That doesn't.
Maria MacMullin:I don't understand that, I don't. I mean, I'm not asking you to answer that, I'm just just just to make a sense. No, I mean it is hard.
Rachel Louise Snyder:We all have, we do all have blinders, but I also think I mean in fairness, I also think she evolved quite a lot and he definitely evolved. I mean, by the end of her life and his life he was doing all. You know there. I grew up in a very gendered house. Right, the man goes out and works, the woman doesn't work. Yes, yes, even during periods when he had lost his job and they're on food stamps and she was like I can go get a job. He, I found out many years later, he was like no, no, no, it's my responsibility. So you know, they had this incredibly gendered expectations.
Rachel Louise Snyder:She did all the cooking and cleaning. She was an awful cook, just one of the worst cooks I ever encountered and never, never got any better. I mean just, it was just awful from day one. But by the end of their, their, both of their lives, the last 15 years or so, he was the one doing all the cooking, all the grocery shopping, all the cleaning, all the laundry. So he had evolved in certain ways and so had she.
Rachel Louise Snyder:And I do think that comes. I mean, god, god, god helped the person who doesn't evolve as they grow and age. And you know, I think she also even evolved when it came to religion. She, you know she very much, even though she said she could see her angel and Jesus waiting for her. You know, as she was on her deathbed in the years prior to that, she no longer believed in a literal heaven and hell and said that my father didn't believe in it either. Now he never said that to me, but that for them, that is profound evolution to not believe literal heaven and hell. So I do think, I do think that when she called him Satanly, she was referring to the best version of himself. She was referring to the version that she got when he was, you know, in his 70s and into his 80s. He died when he was 81. So, yeah, but that, yeah, you're right, it's, it's there's no, there's no reckoning there, I guess.
Maria MacMullin:No for sure, and so you know. I wanted to ask you, too, about the experience you had with CPS, child Protective Services, because there was a point when you were still living in the house and you reveal the abuse to. Was it a high school counselor?
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yep, Bob Martin. I'll never forget him and Bob.
Maria MacMullin:Martin told you, you know, looked you straight in the eye and said I am going to have to report this.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Maria MacMullin:And you were removed from the home and put in temporary foster care, which was also apparently very challenging situation. So just commenting on, you know, Child Protective Services and that experience did it help more than it hurt, or vice versa?
Rachel Louise Snyder:It got me out of the house for two weeks, which was a breather. Yeah, I think it was about two weeks. I'm sure they must have interviewed me, but I don't recall them interviewing me, which is why it's not in the book, because I don't remember. I know that they did an investigation of my father and I know because Bob Martin's told me that. Bob Martin told me that.
Rachel Louise Snyder:And yeah, the foster home was like Lord of the Flies. It was a bunch of kids, most of them temporary, and we were all just doing drugs. And of course, the one kid who was the son of the foster father was just the target of our ridicule and abuse. And oh the poor kid. I feel so bad for him now. I wish I could remember his name, but the foster dad was a cop who worked second shift, so I don't even remember what he looked like. All I know is that in this house we did drugs and it was chaos and you had your bag of stuff and you kept everything that you had in your bag of stuff because otherwise it would potentially get stolen or used or whatever. But it was also absolute freedom. So I didn't recognize it as total chaos until much later. I was like who approved that? Surely, that guy was only approved because he was a cop in a predominantly white middle class.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, it was kind of a jaw dropping couple of pages for sure, yeah, I mean it was also.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Let's see, it would have been about 1982, 83. So we weren't so progressive in advance. But I do think CPS. There's a wonderful book that you may have read, called we Were Once a Family by Roxanna Asgarian. I actually was, I'm proud to say, was on the committee that awarded her a prize, the Lucas Prize from Columbia Journalism School. It's a fantastic book about the.
Rachel Louise Snyder:If you remember the story of the six adopted kids and the two mothers, the lesbian couple and they drove off a cliff in California a few years ago, maybe five or six years ago killed them all. It made huge national news. But she went back and investigated all those kids, turned out three of them who were siblings, had a living brother, older brother, who did not get adopted and didn't even know that his siblings had been killed in this manner. She found out from the reporter. It was awful. But she does an incredible deep dive into CPS. You should have her on your show. She's absolutely fantastic. The book is amazing, but it's a look at CPS today and what goes wrong, what goes right, what the barriers are. Obviously, the barriers are that we just don't have enough people. We don't pay these people enough. They're like teachers. They're the most important people in these kids' lives. We pay them crap and make them work crap hours with enormous caseloads. And what do we expect? How do we expect a system like overburden system, like that, to work?
Maria MacMullin:Well, yeah, and I mean those are really good points and I appreciate the reference to that book. I also think that we don't spend any time listening to children and what children need and what they want and what their experiences are, and so the system fails children over and over again by just not fully taking into consideration the whole experience of domestic violence and how complex it really is. So, in addition to all of this, everything we've talked about so far you spent some time in Cambodia, which is talk about abuse, right? So it's a country that has a long-storied history with crimes against humanity, and I'm curious how you decided to come to live there and what that experience was like.
Rachel Louise Snyder:That was a wild left turn in my life. I lived there for six years, one of the most formative experiences in my life. And so when I say domestic abuse is like an authoritarian government, I'm thinking about Pol Pot, right? He tried to coercively control an entire generation and when he couldn't, he arrested people and tortured them and he would get confessions, but they weren't confessions that were legitimate, right? I mean, you're going to say anything to stay alive. So I do think we need to draw bigger lines of connectivity between the way the state governments run in some of these countries and what happens inside the home. I don't think there is a difference in that violence. Certainly in the scale there is, but not in the underlying psychology of people like Putin, people like Kim Jong-un.
Rachel Louise Snyder:So I moved to Cambodia because I had gone there in 1996 and it was very the first. Un elections had only taken place a few years earlier and they were the first elections after the genocide, which was 1975 to 1979. And so the next 12 years after the genocide is chaos in the country. What's our system of government going to be? How are we going to rebuild our society? How can we feed our people? I mean, you know those immediate concerns. And so in 1996, you really could feel, palpably feel the trauma, and as a place that just stayed with me, you know it was under martial law. As it turns out, there would be a coup just nine or 10 months after I visited that killed 17 people in the capital city. So, as a country has stayed with me, and by then I was a working journalist and the government announced that they were going to have war crimes tribunal. Finally, for Pol Pot died, I think, in 1997, but for the other leaders of Khmer Rouge, and so I decided to move there for a year if I hated it and two years if I loved it, and I ended up staying for six.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I gave birth to my daughter in Bangkok. It was, it was a hugely important time in my life because I learned that a lot of what had been religion dictating my father's life was actually embedded in our culture. It was actual, like we don't talk about religion as a cultural force, but it really is. And the way the Khmer is the proper pronunciation. Everybody says Khmer, but it's actually Khmer. The way Khmer people live, with their brand of religion, is very, very different, and it was so eye opening for me to begin to understand not only what it meant to live in a different culture, but what my culture could be defined as Like. I don't think you can really define America or what it means to be an American unless you leave America and look at it from the outside. In, and so it was. It just was maybe the most important thing that I've ever done in my life Six years. I miss it all the time.
Maria MacMullin:Well, it's such an amazing part of the book too, this amazing part of the story of you, and I took away from that period in your life a tremendous amount of self exploration for you, finding a place where you belong, your experiences in the temple, where you really felt at peace, like you felt like, yes, this is palpable, this is. If there's a religion, this space is it? It doesn't involve you know, everything that that was kind of forced on you during your childhood. It was a really beautiful thing to include in the book because I felt like you finally were able to find the space just to exist and take your time with yourself and explore like the things that you did not get to overcome or confront when you were a child.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, I think that's very true. I brought home with me many things from Cambodia, but one of the things I brought home is a spirit house which is, you know, a very small version of a pagoda. They have them all over Southeast Asia. And you know, I like incense for my friends, I like incense on the anniversary of my mother's death. It's in my yard now. It's made of concrete, so it's pretty indestructible. And I don't you know, I'm not Buddhist, but I believe in things that we don't know. I believe that my stepmother saw her what she saw, as her angel. I believe that why not? You know, it doesn't have to be the way that I live. Like one of the most important things, I think for me, one of the most important learning experiences, was that you don't have to choose. You don't have to choose between Jesus and Allah and Buddha and Krishna. You don't have to make that choice. You can live a life in which you are open to all of it and you get to define your own life.
Maria MacMullin:And there are really beautiful rituals from all different religious traditions. Yes, and when one or more of those really speak to you and be, you know, if you feel like you really feel them as part of your being. That's important to note and important to follow. And I haven't been to Cambodia, but I've been to Vietnam, so I'm very familiar with the pagoda. Yes, and I just, you know, have these memories of dragging my kids through the streets of Vietnam, going in all these different temples and then just being like where are we? Like, what is this?
Rachel Louise Snyder:They have such a specific smell of wax from the candles and incense and probably a little bit of mildew and mold in there too, but yeah from the dampness.
Maria MacMullin:There's a lot of dampness, a lot of yeah yeah.
Rachel Louise Snyder:So the Cambodian Buddhism is very different than Vietnamese, because Vietnamese are descendants of China, so they have Tibetan influences, and Cambodians are descendants of India. So they look, you know, do you see a lot of sort of like curly haired Khmer, because they're descendants? So if you look at Angkor Wat, for example, you find a lot of imagery that is pulled from both Buddhism and Hinduism. You'll find a lot of Hindu gods represented in the carvings there. So it's really interesting. They have a kind of their Buddhism is a blend of Hinduism, animism and what we would recognize as Buddhism. So you know, that translates to things like there's a life in everything. You know they believe there's a life in everything. They believe that dogs can see spirits and they believe that there is a spirit world just sort of running right alongside our human world. It's fascinating, it's sort of beautiful to think of our ancestors, for example, living in this spirit world.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, and you talk about that in the book when there was a neighbor that died right and there was a really beautiful extended period of time of kind of mourning and remembrance of this neighbor so that she would feel supported when she left this experience and went into the spiritual realm, and it sounded like that really spoke to you, like it was really meaningful to you, was it?
Rachel Louise Snyder:It was meaningful to me because of course you know it was a man, our male neighbor. Oh, yeah, yeah. How would you know that? I don't know.
Maria MacMullin:I don't know.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Because of course I want to think of my own mother, you know as accessible in a certain way. Yeah, they close. What they do is they close down the street in front of the person's house, the family's house where they've lost their loved one, and the monks come very early in the morning, so early in the morning, and they start their prayers through very low quality speakers. But they start their prayers and it's seven days. They hang a white alligator flag outside.
Rachel Louise Snyder:So you know it's a funeral, you know it's a mourning period and people just come. There's no invitation really. People just come and they sit for a while and they leave, and they come and go and they have soup, noodle soup and they're available to pray with the monks and you talk to the families and the spirit of the departed person is just going from house to house to say goodbye, to say their goodbyes before they go to their next plane of existence. And at the end of seven days you collectively, as a group, march or walk or drive whatever to the pagoda with the monks and that's where they're cremated. So it's a very communal. In some ways it reminds me of sitting Shiva in Jewish.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, I was just thinking that. I was just thinking the same thing.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, and you know we didn't sit Shiva for my mother. We only did that for about two days because my father was Christian, my mother was Jewish and I think what would it have been had we done that for her? How would it have given me like a period of time to breathe and mourn and commune with people who loved me? So yeah, and you know we have. I mean, I have this. I had a dog, kamau, that I got right when I moved to Cambodia. I got her in November, I had moved there in like August or something, and she, kamau means black or black spirit in Khmer, and our neighbors all said like, oh, she can see. Of course, like all the other dogs, she can see the spirits, and I sort of didn't put much stock in that. But then when this neighbor died, kamau was sitting in the corner of our living room staring up at the corner hour after hour after hour, and so much so that I was like is she? Has she gone blind?
Rachel Louise Snyder:Like what's going on with her, and it was our landlord's nephew came upstairs Pusit is his name and he sat down and he invited us to come and have noodle soup and mourn the neighbor. And then I pointed to Kamau and said you know, pusit, she's been sitting like that all day. And I was kind of laughing about it like crazy dog. And he said, oh, no, well, she's seeing the spirit. The spirit is waiting and the neighbor is waiting for you to say goodbye so that he can move on. And I was so struck by that I was like, wow, okay, I, okay, I see.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, and what's really interesting is that it sounds like this experience of death in this Cambodian town it's integrated within the experience of living, whereas in America there are two distinctly different things you are alive and then you are dead. So there's a living experience, of you being alive, and then there's your death, and there's that experience. They don't exist in tandem. Yeah, and you kind of talk about that in the book when you say you know, you refer to the space quote between alive and not alive as quiet violence that silences all of us, and so that we can't really, in American terms or culture, kind of get our vocabulary around what that is when we're alive and then kind of experiencing an illness that leads to death, and then they don't exist in the same space, they're separate.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, I think you know. I think a lot about my stepmother in hospice because she had this period of time where her consciousness and awareness was a place separate from us. She wasn't technically dead, but she was seeing things that we weren't seeing. She was inside of her body in a way that none of us you know who are fully alive are inside of our bodies. And you know, in Cambodia, the, when a person dies, the body is kept in the house for a period of time, those for those seven days and people can come and pay homage to them.
Rachel Louise Snyder:The younger, kids and the older like it's women usually are washing the body as a way to take away the stigma of death. And I think you know I had a research assistant who talked to me about her grandmother dying and how, you know, she had to sit with her grandmother's body all night with her mother and she said, you know, at first I was scared and then it was just normal and then I was bored and it really did take away the stigma of death and later, many years later, when her own mother died, she felt the sacredness of washing her mother's body and wrapping her mother's body and just being in that space. That is not quite gone and also not quite there. You know.
Maria MacMullin:And this was a person in Cambodia.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, yeah, khmer woman named Sophia, a friend of mine, a good friend of mine. I'm still a friend of mine, but it was so beautiful to hear her describe it. It was like her last kind of communion with her mother. And I think, you know, I have a friend here in the States who's training to be a death doula and is wanting to do that same thing, and there is something very sacred to me about that idea and something so profoundly intimate, like more intimate than sex, more intimate than you know, I would say as intimate as giving birth, yeah, and just as it's one of the most profound human experiences, but you know there's no one there to talk about it after.
Maria MacMullin:And it's something that is done around the world. But in American culture it's rather new to our experience or it's reemerging in our experience. It probably did exist many years prior and then just wasn't part of American culture for a while.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Well, it was commercialized. You know, we turned it into a capitalist culture.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, yeah, like everything else.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Like everything else exactly.
Maria MacMullin:Speaking of the American experience and really swinging this pendulum back the other way. Tell us about your experience at Barbizon and then the influence of both your maternal grandmother and that this experience had on your life.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Oh my gosh Barbizon crazy.
Maria MacMullin:I'm old enough to know what that is and, reading the words in the book, just happy laugh out loud. Oh my God. We may need to fill in some of the gaps for people listening who may not know of Barbizon.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Yeah, I mean, some of the turns that my life have taken have been. Many of them were serious, but there were some that were just ludicrous, and this was one of them. And so my grandmother, you know my mother's mother, was this kind of New England, staunch New England, blue blood Jew. You know she didn't have a lot of money but she was solidly middle class, probably at times in her life upper middle class. And when I started to fail out of school and you know she lived in Boston, she wasn't sort of up close to what was going on, so she had only kind of snippets and she would see me come in the summertime and I'd have, you know, thick black eyeliner on like rock roll, you know, ripped up T-shirts and she was just a guest, right, because my mother or her daughter had gone to this you know private girl school called Brimmer May. And so my grandmother's like, oh my gosh, and at one point so I was kicked out of the house at 16 and just worked low wage, awful jobs until I was 19. And, yeah, about 19,.
Rachel Louise Snyder:But I think when I was maybe 18, my grandmother called me one day and said I found an advertisement shit, a very thick New York, like Boston accent, I don't know why. I just went British there but I found an advertisement for a finishing school and I think you should go and I was like finishing school, you know, I pictured like learning how to serve tea and you know crumbits or whatever. And I was like what Cause? I'm just this rock and roll 80s metal kid, you know. And she said it's called Barbizon. And I was like Barbizon, are you kidding me? Like Barbizon in the back of 17 magazine. You know, be a model and just look at one. And I thought this was hilarious, like it was clear to me instantly that my grandmother didn't really know what Barbizon was. They did have a section on setting tables and throwing dinner parties and holding conversation, but you know it was a nine months money making venture into like modeling. And so I was like sure, barbizon and she. So she sends me there on Saturdays, like nine to five every Saturday for nine months. Actually, I dropped out. I didn't finish Barbizon, I'm sorry to say I left right before the table setting.
Rachel Louise Snyder:But while I was there, my teacher at Barbizon, tamara, a woman named Tamara, became a friend of mine and I used to hang out with her like on the weekend. She was beautiful, she looked like snow white and she was 10 years older than me and she had two kids. She was a single mom, like barely making ends meet but also doing catalog modeling and things like that, and we were in a club one night. She got me into a club even though I wasn't old enough. It was a huge club called Club Dimensions in Northwest Indiana and she was talking to the bartender. There was a big stage but nobody was there. No one's playing. There were probably 10 people in the whole place and the bartender mentioned to her that they can't find bands to play to fill the place. And she looks at me, she gestures toward me and she goes. She knows a band, which is true. I had gone to high school with a drummer of a band called White Lie and I just instantly was like oh yeah, I know a band. And the guy's like oh, let me get the manager. The manager comes over and I just fake it.
Rachel Louise Snyder:One of the many things I learned from my father, who spent his life in sales, was you just have confidence in the thing that you're selling.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I remember my father saying to me many years ago everybody's in sales, whether they know it or not, and as a writer especially as a freelance writer that really stuck with me.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I was like I'm just in sales and so I had this swagger, I think, and the manager showed me around the whole club and so I call up the drummer the next day like, hey, you want to play? This club called Club Dimensions in Northeast Virginia and they ended up selling out the place and they were again. It was like the 80s with metal. It had big hair band days and I loved it, and I ended up booking them for probably a year and a half. I wasn't even old enough to be in most of the clubs I was booking them in. Of course, neither was he the drummer, and it gave me a confidence that I just had never had. Like I can do something, I can be something. Like I'd watch them on stage and be like and this is awful to say, but this is where my 18-year-old brain was I'd be like I'm not a groupie, like these other groupies, they're a booking agent.
Maria MacMullin:Of course I'm a booking agent, but you kind of were, you kind of were their booking agent Of course, I was their booking agent.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I was also definitely a groupie, but it just was like, oh, I can do something. And their producer ended up really taking me under his wing and teaching me everything about the business, befriending me. I mean, we also dated a little bit Was this Frank? This is Frank, and he is the one he's like Stevie Nicks' producer these days, like he's a big producer, and Frank Papalardo is his name.
Rachel Louise Snyder:And he said to me one day, like when I was 19 years old, what are you going to do with your life? And I was like well, this, I'm going to book bands. They're going to make it big. And he was like no, no, no, no, no, you've got to go to college. He had gone to college and I was just like I can't go to college, I didn't finish high school. And he said that doesn't matter, you can go to college, just get your GED. And he really made it sound like this is not a big deal at all. And he said to me I'll never forget this. He said to me you've got to go to college. What are you going to? Be? A loser for the rest of your life? And I was like and he didn't say it Meanly. He said it almost like a joke this is your option you go to college or you're a loser. And he made an appointment for me with a admissions counselor, changed my life.
Maria MacMullin:I mean it just yeah, it barbs on like ha ha ha, it's so funny, right, but that was really a pivotal moment.
Rachel Louise Snyder:It has this incredible, profound experience and Frank, let me just say, is still a friend today. He refers to himself as Chapter 27. I love that he came. When I was on book tour, some of the guys from White Lie came and played and my book reading goes hi y'all.
Maria MacMullin:That is amazing.
Rachel Louise Snyder:And I'm so grateful. The older you get, I think, the more grateful we are to these what seem like just momentary chance meetings or chance happenings that end up having this profound effect. And again, I think, like you know what, I was open to it. I said yes, this ridiculous thing from my grandmother. I said yes to that manager in that bar. I said yes to Frank. I said yes when the college admissions counselor said we're going to take a chance on you.
Rachel Louise Snyder:So some of it is just like get over your fear. Right, I was afraid. Of course, I was afraid of doing all those things, even Barbizon. I was like they're going to see that I'm ugly and kick me out or something Like it was a part of me. That was like laughing about it, but also like scared, like I'm going to be in there with these tall, beautiful, thin women and they're going to be like what are you doing here? So I think some of it is. There's a lesson there. And certainly I was scared to move to Cambodia. Like most of the things that have been worth doing in my life are things that I was really afraid of doing.
Maria MacMullin:Yeah, I can relate to that. I'm sure many of our listeners can relate to that too. That is the truth. But I was just so. I was there cheering you on when you signed that band and when you said yes, to get your GED, I was like you go. I mean, I was so proud of you and the name of that band, white Lai. I actually thought that was like a name you made up for the book because oh, it's so crazy. I know the irony of it all I know.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I know it's so funny. It's their actual name and they we actually have a group.
Maria MacMullin:I mean one little white lie here I'm a band A little white lie, yeah, exactly.
Rachel Louise Snyder:We have a playlist on Spotify, a shared playlist. Now that's so funny.
Maria MacMullin:The white lies of it all, you know, I'm really curious about if you had an intended audience in mind when you wrote this book.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Readers. I mean, the book is most often compared to the Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls and Educated by Tara Westover. So people who like those books would like women we buried, women we burned. So I guess if I thought of a reader, I kind of thought of people who liked those books. But no, I think for a lot of writers you try to put the reader out of your mind while you're writing in a very conscious way, because otherwise you're writing to a reader instead of writing to the story, to the truth of the story, trying to let the story emerge out of you in a way.
Maria MacMullin:And it's a mature story, right, I mean, it does require a sense of understanding. This is going to be a difficult topic when you approach this book. There's some really mature themes and there's a lot of conversation these days about books that address controversial subjects. And she's laughing.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Well, because we don't outlaw nuclear war or AR-15s, but we outlaw, we ban, books. There's the power of language for you.
Maria MacMullin:OK, yeah, I mean, I knew I was going to be pushing a button with this.
Rachel Louise Snyder:So I'm curious about.
Maria MacMullin:I like to push buttons. I'm curious about really how you feel about banning books, rating books for age groups. If you would let your own child read this book, your book, if you were not the author.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Well, she hasn't read it, although I'd love her to. She's never read any of my books.
Maria MacMullin:Is that by her choice. She just is like no, this can't be good, because my mother wrote it.
Rachel Louise Snyder:It's like if you could put it in snippets on TikTok, I would watch it. Oh, she is 15, so there's, that yes she's 15.
Rachel Louise Snyder:So she absolutely I would let her read it. I would let her read no Visible Bruises, and I'll tell you why because the women in no Visible Bruises who wound up eventually killed by their partner all met that partner when they were 14, 15, 16 years old. So not only do I think that teenagers should read both these books, I would like to encourage teenagers to read both these books. Teenagers are dealing with adult things in their life and there are 18 states right now that have no mandated sex education. In this country, and at least six of those states they're opt-in only, including, for example, texas, and in those states that are opt-in only, they're abstinence-based sex education. So I'm getting as a professor at American University, I'm getting college students who've never been introduced, for example, to the concept of consent. What do you think happens when they go to their first drinking party?
Speaker 3:And.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I'm talking across the gender spectrum. They have no sex education. So I think we are doing our kids a disservice. Do I think they should be rated? The books should be rated. I don't know, I mean maybe, but I think it should be up to the kid what books they read, and maybe the librarian. But I'm not for the banning of any material, no matter how difficult. I don't think that I'm Jewish. I don't think mine Comf should be banned. I think people should read it and learn from it so that we don't have another situation like what happened during the Holocaust.
Rachel Louise Snyder:What I tell my daughter and what I tell my students and what I tell I'm the guest in lots and lots of classrooms. I've spoken to something like 20,000 people since no visible bruises came out. My speaking agent gave me the numbers recently and what I say to them is if you don't read, you will never understand the forces and the systems that control your life and your world. That's what we lose when we aren't reading even things that are uncomfortable, when we don't give young teenagers the agency to say no, no, no, I'm not ready for that, or no, you're too jealous, I'm not comfortable with that. The stakes are too high. They wind up dead. And if you're my daughter, she's known this stuff for years. She's got a boyfriend now and she does have the advantage of being able to say to her boyfriend like so my mom wrote this book called no Visible Bruises. Luckily, I love her boyfriend. He's wonderful, but all kids should have that advantage. All kids should have the power of language, do you think? Obviously it's more powerful than guns, because we don't ban guns.
Maria MacMullin:Well, yeah, that's another episode. You read a lot when you were a child, correct? I think I took that away from your earphone. Yes and no.
Rachel Louise Snyder:I read a lot when my mother was alive, but after she died my father was not a reader and he became even less of a reader after her death. So we didn't have a lot of books. We weren't allowed to read secular books. In my evangelical house, I think, we had the Bible. We had both the King James and the New International Version, and we had pilgrims, progress, whatever, but we were not really allowed to read. I loved reading, but I didn't have access and we weren't because we didn't have many books. We also weren't a library family. I have so many writer friends who were like.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Every Saturday my mother took me to the library. I never walked into a library ever until I was older, and so I had a neighbor who one afternoon, when I was about 14, took me up to her parents' bedroom and showed me her mother's a very extensive collection of Harlequin's, and she let me borrow them one at a time, and I devoured those books secretly at night. I loved them and it's why I have no, I really have no judgment. As long as people are reading, I don't, I'm not gonna judge what they're reading. They wanna read. You know, dean Koons and all the Harlequin romances is fine with me, even my students. You know who come in and they don't have these long reading backgrounds. You know, I eventually made my way to Dostoevsky but it took a few decades and I'm a massive reader now. But you know, reading is reading is important for brain development too, not just for making sense of the world we live in.
Maria MacMullin:So yeah, and just to like kind of close the loop on this and bring a full circle.
Maria MacMullin:I'm just thinking about number one.
Maria MacMullin:If you had access to more literature and memoirs and information in books because books clearly spoke to you in an important way you may have had different opportunities as a child experiencing abuse.
Maria MacMullin:And so then, coming you know, fast forward to today, for survivors or children who are experiencing abuse now, or people who are experiencing domestic violence, when they have access to a book that reveals the patterns of abuse and the power and control and you know all the things that can happen in domestic violence, child abuse, religious abuse, financial abuse and so on, that is giving them lots of information, it's giving them hope, it's giving them access to potential resources and to support and help. And so reading is critical and a memoir like this one really can give someone a lifeline in a way that's meaningful to them, whether it's a 15-year-old girl or, you know, someone in a different age group who's experiencing domestic violence. It's important to keep writing, it's important to keep reading and it's important to keep access to written material open especially just talking about it, and within the context of violence in the home, child abuse, domestic violence.
Maria MacMullin:It's important to have these stories out there and I'm so grateful to have had this time to talk with you about this today and for you to for sharing your story with the world. I just want to thank you.
Rachel Louise Snyder:Well, thank you for having me. It's been such a pleasure to be able to have a deep dive with you.
Maria MacMullin:Attention Spanish-speaking listeners. Listen to the end of this podcast for information on how to reach a Spanish-speaking representative of Genesis. If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, you can get help or give help at genesisshelterorg or by calling or texting our 24-7 Crisis Hotline team at 214-946-HELP 214-946-4357. Bilingual services at Genesis include text phone call, clinical counseling, legal services, advocacy and more. Call or text us for more information. Donations to support women and children escaping domestic violence are always needed. Learn more at genesisshelterorg slash donate. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3:I'm reminding you always that ending domestic violence begins when we believe her Genesis El Podcast announces Bilingual Services available in Genesis Women's Shelter, eSupport. If you or someone you know is in an abusive relationship, you can get help or give help at genesisshelterorg or by calling or texting our 24-7 Crisis Hotline team at 214-946-4357. Bilingual services at Genesis include text, phone call, counseling, legal services, advocacy and more. Call or text us for more information. Donations are always needed to support women or children escaping domestic violence. Learn more at our website at genesisshelterorg slash donate. Thanks for joining us. Remember that ending domestic violence begins when we believe in the victim.