Home Is Where We Start

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years. While the adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. In this memoir, Crossman asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments and explores how growing up estranged from the outside world shapes her as a parent today.