SUSANNA CROSSMAN grew up in an international utopian community in England during the 1970s and 80s. Now based in France, she works internationally as a writer, clinical arts therapist, and lecturer. Her recent writing has featured in Aeon, the Paris Review and Berfois. She is a contributor to anthologies We'll Never Have Paris (Repeater Books, 2019) and Trauma (Dodo Ink, 2020). Her first novel, Dark Island, is published in French with La Croisée/Grupe Delcourt, 2021, as L'île Sombre, translation by Carine Chichereau. Her second novel, The Orange Notebooks, will be published with Bluemoose Books in Spring 2025. She lives in Brittany with her partner and three daughters.

Her memoir, Home is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream, published 15 August 2024 with the Fig Tree imprint of Penguin UK grows from her essay in Aeon (29 September 2022) which is now being taught in the creative writing MA program at University of London. 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. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys. Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman revisits her past, turning to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home.

Home is Where We Start is Serialized in The Guardian - a 6-page feature that was #1 most read in the Lifestyle section and #5 across the entire Guardian (weekend of Aug 10, 2024)

A Guardian Book to Look Out For in 2024

A Bookseller Editor's Choice

Best New Books to Read in August 2024, iweekend

REVIEWS:

"Fascinating…vivid and poignant details make Home Is Where We Start a powerful memoir of a particularly unusual childhood." The Observer

"I hugely admire Crossman's resistance against the tyranny of it all – and her constant will to survive…Throughout the book she interrogates utopian ideas, as well as sharing insights from psychological research, philosophical thinking and her therapeutic practice." the i newspaper

"Beautiful, Bold, Tender. I loved this gorgeous memoir about making home."Pragya Agarwal, author of Hysterical

"Brave and beautifully written. An extraordinary anxiety-inducing dive into life in a late-70s/80s utopia, told through a child's eyes. Be careful what you wish for..." Allan Jenkins, Editor of Observer Food Monthly and author of Plot 29

"Crossman is strikingly good on how children pay the price for adult utopian fantasies, as props and as scapegoats." Noreen Masud, author of A Flat Place

"She writes with such curiosity and heart-breaking honesty of what it is to find her own truth. I was enthralled by this book." Lily Dunn, author of Sins of My Father

"A bold and intimate grappling with the hidden history at the heart of a childhood that was set up as a collectivist social experiment. A true piece of work and one that is historically significant." Ewan Morrison, award-winning author of How to Survive Everything and Nina X

"A brilliant memoir - a touching, propulsive and shocking portrayal of a childhood in a utopian community, framed by a fascinating exploration of what it means to create a space called home." Sam Mills, author of The Fragments of My Father

"Authentic, irreverent and generous. Crossman breathes fresh life into a childhood spent living in an experimental community in the English countryside. In vivid, staccato prose, she plunges from screamingly funny episodes into fear and despair, conjuring dizzying freedoms, strange new 'rules', the constant lack of privacy and the bright hopes that magnetise everyone around her. It's a miracle she emerged intact to gift us this story, shot through with understanding and forgiveness" Marina Benjamin, author of A Little Give

"A gripping account of a childhood lived among idealist zealots: detailed, lyrical and full of insight, told with the dispassionate eye of the anthropologist, but also the emotional engagement of the adult looking back at the child." Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of Rain

"Destined to be one of the books of the year…Illuminating, complex, thought-provoking." Stu Hennigan, author of Ghost Signs

RECENT WORK:

British Vogue How I Reclaimed My Style – And Identity – After Growing Up In A Radical '70s Commune

Aeon, The Play Cure

MAI, Fieldnotes From La Maternité

Paris Review The Only Believers

Berfrois Edie Bakes Cakes short story, selected as Longform Fiction Pick of the Week (20 April 2020)

Read interview and prize-winning story, Oh, I Do Love a Banana and listen to the story read by actress Rebecca Peyton and Susanna discussing her literary life with acclaimed writer and editor Elena Lappin on the Lovereading Podcast

Berfrois A Year Of Yellow Edges

Burning House Press By the Water's Edge

Burning House Press Faith Is an Egg With a Thin Shell

Burning House Press Douze – Twelve Stakes from these Dark Ages

Versopolis Give Me Life: The Camille Claudel Project

Riggwelter Press The Nomenclature of a Toddler, nominated for Best of the Net in Creative Non-fiction

Litro Wild Thing, Or The Law Of Superposition

3AM Magazine poem brut #26 – the diverse colors of needlework

The Stockholm Review of Literature The Ruin

Queens Mob Not My Writing Desk

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