Rachel Louise Snyder on Loss and Domestic Violence

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, our next guest has extensively reported on domestic violence, and is now sharing her own painful story. Rachel Louise Snyder is an award-winning author and journalism professor. She’s chronicling her dark past and the lessons she’s learned in a new memoir. And she’s joining Michel Martin to explore that life story.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thank you, Christiane. Rachel Louise Snyder, thank you so much for talking with us.

RACHEL LOUISE SNYDER, AUTHOR, “WOMEN WE BURIED, WOMEN WE BURNED: A MEMOIR”: Thank you for having me.

MARTIN: You know, you are a distinguished writer and journalist who has written about some difficult issues, particularly domestic violence. What made this the time to dig into your own story?

SNYDER: I think that anybody who has known me for any period of time at all would’ve expected that this would’ve been my first book. I mean, I always knew that I had an unconventional life and an unconventional background, but I just was more interested in being a writer, seeing the world, learning the stories of other people. And I think my — you know, my stepmother passed away and some sort of big life changes happened that just put me in a reflective place and it seemed like the time was right.

MARTIN: So, let’s talk about the things that is, I guess, most attention getting about your book.

SNYDER: What is most — I don’t actually know what’s most attention.

MARTIN: Well, the most attention getting thing, I think, for a lot of people is that your life changed in an instant with the death of your mother. Is that — you were — your mom is Jewish. Just a classic, loving mom. You know, a hugging mom that made you feel great. But she died really early in your life from breast cancer. Your dad then marries someone who is involved with this very strict evangelical church. And you — and then, sort of brings you into this kind of radically different existence. Could you talk a little bit about that? And I have to tell you that it’s painful to read.

SNYDER: Yes.

MARTIN: And so, it had to have been painful to live.

SNYDER: I mean, of course I’m tempted to crack a joke because that’s my way of kind of dealing with things, right? I’m like, oh, yes. So, it’s really hard, but what doesn’t destroy make makes me better writer. But it was hard. And you would think that the death of my mother, I was eight, she was 35, would be the big thing, and it was in certain ways, but it kind of set in motion this total upheaval. We moved across the country. We no longer went to temple or celebrated any of the high holidays. We no longer had the support system of our neighborhood and our family in Pennsylvania where we lived at the time. We had moved to Illinois. And I think, for me, the most disruptive was this woman really kind of immediately becoming, I was supposed to make her a stand-in for my mother. I was pubescent when they married, I was about 11, so I was just on the verge of, you know, what are really big changes for girls. And, you know, I didn’t feel like I could talk to her about any of that. The morning of the wedding, which was two months after they started dating, you know, my father brought me down to the church basement and said, Rachel, meet your new mother. And it’s easy for us to look at that now, especially now that I’m a parent myself and say, wow, that was spectacularly bad parenting. But I also think that, in 1979, my father must have felt this intense pressure to not be a single father, like he must have felt that he was inadequate. And everything changed. And I rebelled immediately. I rebelled against the religion. I rebelled against the new family structure. I rebelled in every way I could.

MARTIN: You and the other kids were immediately subjected to this kind of regiment of corporal punishment. You called this ritualized corporal punishment. And you talk about how, you know, your parents would line you up over this oversized, I guess, sofa in the living room and then, you’d assume the position, leaning over, and you’d be spanked in an assembly line. And, you know, what was that about?

SNYDER: Yes. Corporal punishment was mandated by the church. You know, they believed they would “spare the rod, spoil the child.” And I — you know, I have since learned — only very recently, I’ve learned that there are something like 18 states in the U.S. where corporal punishment is allowed in public schools. So, you know, we can talk about that after my next book, but I mean, I am horrified by that, absolutely horrified. And I didn’t — you know, it was so normalized in my house that all it did was make me angry. It didn’t cause me to reflect, it didn’t make me respect my parents more or follow God, it did none of the things that it was supposed to do. And it was a form of ritualized torture. I’ll tell you something that I’m reticent to say because I just did this last week. But I was in Chicago having dinner with a woman who I’ve used as a source in many domestic violence stories in my previous book. And we were drinking martinis. And I said to her, was I — do you think I was a victim of domestic violence? Like, I had never thought about myself that way because it was so orderly and ritualized. And she said, of course, absolutely. And it’s shaken me. It’s been like 10 days since that conversation and I’m thinking about that like every hour.

MARTIN: One of the things that strikes me about your book is that you talk about these just really horrifying, to me, things, but your description of it is so beautiful. I mean, you — your writing is so exquisite. And just – – let me just read this where you talk about being spanked in an assembly line. You say, I never remember what we had done to earn this punishment, only the punishment itself. The anger that swelled like a contagion, from one of us to the next, with each blow. Palpable as mud under your toes. It snaked its way inside me, curled itself around my stomach and into my cells, molded itself into a permanent occupant that I carried like an invisible sarsen. When did you figure that out? Did you know that even then?

SNYDER: I knew then that it would — that it made me angry. I didn’t have the language for the complexity, and I didn’t have the power to be able to sort of fight back intellectually, right? I would say things like, well, nowhere in the bible does it say the teenagers shouldn’t smoke cigarettes. You know, I would say things like that. But I recognized that anger and it just stayed in me for years and years. And, you know, one of the things about writing both this book and my previous book is they’re emotionally intense books, and the writing of them is emotionally intense. And I could only read poetry while I was doing the actual writing. And I think it’s something about holding a narrative in your head, like there’s only room in there for one. And so, some of that language might come from the fact that, like, all I’m reading for months on end is poetry. And poetry gives you this economy of language, you don’t have to judge, right? The judgment comes from the imagery and the way you have constructed some things. So — but it is — yes, even hearing you read that, it’s really — it brings me right back.

MARTIN: This is where your story takes this crazy turn. You were kicked out of school and then you were kicked out of your house at 16.

SNYDER: Yes.

MARTIN: The inevitable happened, you were homeless. You stumble into being the manager of a heavy metal band at 17. You went to the Barbizon Modeling School. You get your GED. You go to college. You got to grad school. But — and then you — somewhere in there, you traveled all around the world.

SNYDER: Yes. All of those unlikely events, it really added up to something, to me, that was like a life in which you didn’t have to have normal boundaries. You didn’t have to have — you could look at that life and say, oh, my gosh, terrible things have happened, yes, and that is true and I’m not minimizing those terrible things that have happened to me, but I also am like, yes, but they freed me. They freed me to define all kinds of things in less traditional ways. There are all kinds of ways that we cage each other in, we define what something is supposed to be according to a definition that comes from somewhere outside of us. And for me, I think having all of those crazy turns just meant, like, oh, I could just keep turning.

MARTIN: You spent years in Cambodia. And you write about a time in Cambodia when your mother’s ghost appeared to you and gave you an important message. And I was wondering if I could get you to read just a portion of that story.

SNYDER: I thought of all those times when I imagined that having a mother would have infused me with some knowledge, unraveled some feminine mystery, answered my many questions, questions about dating, romance, love, relationships, womanhood, children. That’s the question. The only question I really had now. I might someday regret not having one, a terrible reason to have a child. And when you’ve lost one part to death and another into religion, you understand in a gut deep way that there’s no guarantee you’ll make it through the pivotal years of your own child’s life. So, what do you do? This, this has to be one of those important moments a mother can help with. And here was my mother, my actual real mother, and I didn’t know how long she’d stay and so I asked her this crucial question, perhaps the most pressing question of any woman facing down the finish line of her reproductive years. I wish you were here, I said, to help me decide if I should have a child. And I heard her like I could hear, you know, the train behind my house. I heard her say, even if I were there, I couldn’t help you with that. And I had spent my whole life defining myself against the deficits of having a mother figure. I would know how to walk in heels if I had a mother. I would know when somebody was hitting on me if I had had a mother. And here was my own mother sayin, you wouldn’t know that any more than you do know if I were there.

MARTIN: The other thing that I think stands out about her story is that I’m struck by what you said about how so much, you know, for men, you know, finding safety in the world is not considered a priority, right, that men are presumed to be safe until they are not, right?

SNYDER: Yes.

MARTIN: And women are presumed to be unsafe until they are. Your story is so much of one of where it was forced to be sure, you were forced into it, but you’re seeking of adventure, of your embracing the world is what brought to safety.

SNYDER: Yes.

MARTIN: And I think there’s something very different about that. I just wondered if you thought about that?

SNYDER: After my mother died, we grew up sort of being told over and over that we — that the world was an unsafe place. It was full of people who were searching, people who were empty, you know, that their souls were yearning for God, and we not only grew up in a place where we were lucky enough to access that, but we grew up the chosen ones in that place. In other words, America. And once I began to travel, I went on Semester at Sea, which some viewers might know is a semester long program where you’re on a ship and you travel route from country to country, and you’re not traveling like to like Rome and Paris, those are wonderful places, but you’re traveling to places like, you know, Mumbai and Johannesburg and, you know, places that are edgier and certainly, more foreign, right? There’s a very different foreign feeling to Kyoto than there is to London, if you are an American. And so, it upended completely everything I thought I knew about being an American. You know, one of the things I learned being out there in the big wide world is that culture is everything. Culture is not just the food you eat and the entertainment you imbibe, it’s the — your sense of justice. It’s your sense of right and wrong. It’s your moral underpinning. And, you know, it’s everything from jurisprudence to philosophy. And so, being able to kind of disentangle that was so freeing for me because I was able to just say, oh, this is — you know, this is the box that I call culture and my way of looking at it is my way, but it doesn’t mean it’s the right way or only way.

MARTIN: We have so much we could talk about, because there’s so many ideas in it. But I’m going to ask to kind of conclude where we started which is you lost two mothers, your biological mother, your mom, when you were eight and then, your stepmother, who, frankly, was one of the people who one could argue tortured you. Toward the end of her life, you took care of her. Can you just talk a little bit about that? How is it possible for you to offer, you know, that forgiveness to someone who had hurt you so much?

SNYDER: Yes. It’s tough. I’ve had so many people write to me and say, I could’ve never done that. She was also being oppressed in her way by that church and by my father who were, you know, constantly reminding her as a woman that she was sort of second tier and that she was subjugated to him because he was the head of the house. They both changed by the time they both died, I have to say. My father was doing all of the cooking and all the cleaning. And she did none of it. And that’s just one example. There’s many other examples. But when I had a child — my daughter was born in Bangkok, and when I had a child I really thought about my parents in the way that you do and thought, you know, that was really terrible parenting that I had. But why is that my daughter’s fault, right? I’m not going to pass along whatever residual anger I feel to her. If she doesn’t want to have a relationship with them, that is fine, but it’s not my decision to keep her from them. And so, she was close to them, especially my father who died right at the start of COVID. And so, bringing her into their lives once or twice a year, I would go out and visit them, you know, brought us back to someplace where we could find some common ground. We didn’t agree with each other religiously, politically, socially, a lot of different ways, but we loved each other. And when she got sick, she had colorectal cancer, I don’t really know why but I’m the kid they called. They could’ve called her — she had two kids from her first marriage. I’m the one they called. And I think it was something about having lost a mother. She wanted to allow me the space to find her in a way, like not in a conscious way, but I just — I remember sitting down with her nine months before she died and I said, can I ask you what cancer feels like in your body? And this is a woman who was very quiet, really shy, and she talked for two hours without stopping that night. It’s the most I’d heard her talk in probably years combined. And I realized she needs to talk about this and she’s also giving me a gift of connecting as women, connecting through generational pain. I felt in some way like she was connected to my real mother. And we talked for the next nine months. I would sit with my computer and take notes. And I think I asked all those questions that you never get to ask someone who is dying, like, are you scared of death? What do you see right now in front of you? All of those — that just every artifice was gone, and I guess it’s something about going into Dante’s, you know, seventh or eighth circle and coming back out and finding breath again.

MARTIN: Well, thank you for sharing this gift with us. Rachel Louise Snyder, thank you so much for talking with us today.

SNYDER: Thank you. It was really a pleasure.