The Power of Forgiveness

Rachel Louise Snyder lost her Jewish mother at 8 and was kicked out of her evangelical father's home at 16 after years of physical abuse. What she did with her life's story is instructive.

Rachel Louise Snyder, summer of 2021 © Deborah Copaken

First, before we get to Rachel Louise Snyder’s story, I have some tangentially-related housekeeping. Last week, I sent out an essay entitled, “Deconstructing the Red Book,” sparked, in no small part, by the thoughts of my classmate who lived through the January 6th riots and implored us all toward deeper self-reflection. In my essay, I was trying to make several disparate points all at once—about the responsibilities of privilege, about reflecting honestly on that privilege, about the harm of American policies, particularly on women and mothers, about the importance of love and presence as sustaining life glues, and about the limitations of narrative truth. My intent in writing it was a call not to arms but rather to vulnerability. To digging deeper when we are asked to tell the stories of our lives.

I failed. Instead of serving as a call toward greater narrative vulnerability, my essay caused those who believed they had been vulnerable to feel not only criticized and hurt, but also judged and exploited. I woke up Friday morning to my phone blowing up, in real time, with dozens upon dozens of comments filled with frustration, anger, and ad hominem attacks under a post a former classmate had created on our class’s private Facebook group linking to my essay. Though I had not meant to hurt anyone, many felt hurt. Though I had not meant to judge anyone, many felt judged. Though I did not call out anyone personally

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, many felt personally insulted and attacked, as if I had been speaking to them directly. I reread the essay through my classmates’ eyes, understood and empathized with their ire, deleted the story, and publicly apologized, acknowledging their pain and expressing sorrow for causing it. I thought this would be the end of it. It was not. It got so ugly and personal, I had to remove myself from the group.

I spent the weekend feeling ashamed for causing others pain, confused about the depth of the reaction, and pondering the limitations of language instead of writing about Rachel Louise Snyder’s memoir, Women We Buried, Women We Burned, which is not only my favorite book I’ve read in years—it has been getting rave reviews everywhere (New York Times, Washington Post)—but it is also a brilliant study in the importance of embracing nuance, vulnerability, and forgiveness.

What Snyder manages to do in her book—much more artfully than I did in my now-deleted essay or than my classmates did in their reactions to it—is to harness deep wells of empathy, including for those who harmed her, and to tell her story in spare and nuanced prose. A feat, this, considering that after her Jewish mother died when Snyder was only eight years old, her newly evangelical father and stepmother would periodically lean her over her dead mother’s couch, along with her brother and two step-siblings, and beat them all with a paddle. Eventually, fed up with their teens’ various needs to be normal teens, her parents lined up four suitcases, one for each child, and kicked them all out the family house.

It’s not that Snyder—only 16 at the time of her banishment from home—lets her parents off the hook for this abuse. She doesn’t. But what she is able to do is to see them as human, flawed, and the products of their own histories and upbringings while simultaneously acknowledging the harm they inflicted. “I want to say that my parents did the best they could under the circumstances and with the resources they had,” she writes, after giving birth to her daughter. “But I don’t think this is true. I don’t think they did their best.”

Snyder was forced to live out of her car on several occasions, or on the couches of others, and she worked a series of menial jobs in order to survive. Now a professor, contributing writer at The New Yorker, Guggenheim fellow, and the author of several books, she eventually earned her GED and made her (own) way to college and beyond. (Her father laid claim to the college fund her late mother had set up for her.) At one point, she booked rock bands. For several years, she lived and worked as a journalist in Cambodia. She writes about all of this not only without a shred of self-pity but with vulnerability, poise, self-deprecating humor, grace, and love.

Moreover—and I don’t want to spoil the ending—but the way the book ends, with several moving reconciliations, had me tearing up on several occasions because of her vulnerability, because of her ability to be so forgiving, because Snyder was able to open her heart wider than anyone could have ever expected her to open it, given the painful facts and raw details of her personal narrative.

Ironically, this was what I was imploring my classmates to do. To dig deeper, to open wider, to be more forgiving of both themselves and others. My mistake was to assume everyone can write and think and find as much empathy and truth as Snyder. We can’t. I cant, and I’ve been doing this for four decades. I guess the best we can do is to live out the remainder of our lives forward, acknowledging the past but not dwelling on it; to tell our own stories with as much honesty as we can each muster; to learn from our mistakes; and to act from a place of as much love and empathy as possible, given the limitations of language, human relations, and self-knowledge.

And when we fail to live up to our better selves—as I did and have done, both in last week’s missive and in countless other times over the course of my 57 years—to acknowledge the harm inflicted, to say, “I’m sorry,” to mean it, and to hope that, in time, those we’ve hurt will be as forgiving of us as Snyder was to her parents.

1. The two classmates I did quote directly, without attribution, were fine with being quoted.