A review by paracyclops
HOME IS WHERE WE START: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream by SUSANNA. CROSSMAN

challenging dark emotional informative inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.0

I read this book with interest, because although I didn't grow up in a commune, I certainly grew up as a child of the counter-culture, and I started to make my way in the adult world with a profound knowledge gap between my own experience, and all the basic assumptions shared by everyone with a more conventional upbringing. That gap has shaped my life and personality at a fundamental level. Susanna Crossman is more or less the same age as me, and many of the experiences she describes are familiar to me, in a way that they could only be to someone whose upbringing reflected a profound rejection of social norms. However, there are a lot of important differences. I lived as an only child, largely in a one-parent, two-person household, while Home is where we start describes Crossman's upbringing as one of a pack of twenty semi-feral, largely unsupervised children. She and her sister were sexually abused—not systematically, but incidentally, in ways that the adults around them should have anticipated and prevented. It's a narrative of ideology prevailing over pragmatic standards of care and nurture. It's a description of one particular intentional community, one with some cult-like, isolationist tendencies, but not actually a cult—rather, a well-intentioned but wrong-headed attempt by a bunch of politically motivated contrarians to live according to their Marxist and feminist ideals. Many communes founded around the same time were not like this—I personally know of a couple that have provided a nurturing environment for their members (of all ages) for around fifty years, evidenced by the continued presence of some of their founding members, now in their 80s and 90s, and the continued association of people raised there. I think it's telling that in the community Crossman grew up in, by the time she left to attend university at the close of the 80s, she and her family were the only original members remaining, and that after she left, she never saw any of them again. This may be a more typical experience, I don't know. Either way, Crossman clearly got the short straw, and her account is a wonderfully erudite exploration of the reasons, the causes, the consequences, and the experience of life in such a community. Her prose is sometimes awkward. She has a deft way of describing scenes as her younger self might have done, but then she continues to use that voice where it isn't really appropriate, and the effect is a bit lumpen. But I took a great deal of pleasure in the way that she draws on a wide range of philosophical, therapeutic, political, and critical writing to analyse and contextualise her experience. Despite the differences in our upbringing, the commonalities felt very validating—I know very few people who began their adult lives as bookish, punk drug-heads with no clear grasp on how most people live their lives or see the world, and I feel like Crossman and I would have a lot to talk about if we ever met.