Home Is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman: a 'delicate and wise' abuse memoir

Book cover of Home Is Where We Start by Susanna Crossman

(Image credit: Penguin Books)

published 22 August 2024

"When Susanna Crossman was six she moved, with her mother, brother and sister, into a rambling mansion in the English countryside," said Christina Patterson in The Sunday Times. The mansion was home to a radical, Soviet-inspired "community" – made up simply of "Adults" and "Kids", to erode the conventional markers of family – and would be her home for the next 15 years.

The Adults had rotating sexual partners, and since there were no locks on the doors, Crossman would often walk in on couples having sex. The Kids were encouraged to be self-sufficient, which in practice meant that they were permanently hungry and filthy, and liable to suffer terrible accidents: one girl set fire to her pyjamas with some candles; another lost half her finger in a sausage machine. "Inevitably", sexual abuse was tacitly accepted: when a man called Lionel invited an 11-year-old Crossman to "spend a night in his Unit", her mother did nothing to intervene. Now in her late 40s, Crossman has revisited her singular childhood in this "delicate and wise" memoir – a book that, while "painful to read", is also "beautifully done".

"It is hard not to feel outraged" by the way Crossman and her peers were sacrificed to the adults' utopian dreams, said Matthew Reisz in The Observer. The kids were permanently freezing, because making sure the boiler worked was considered "symbolic of the patriarchy". Crossman's mother refused to let her take up a place at a grammar school, since she didn't believe in "class inequality". While Crossman's writing about the community is "disturbing and moving", later on, as she describes her efforts to "forge an authentic personal identity", she shows a "weakness for extended metaphors" and pointlessly "poetic" prose. It's a pity that her editor didn't "rein in her excesses".