Conversation with Susanna Crossman
#Scurf210: Essayist, writer and novelist, Susanna Crossman talks to me on how her Aeon essay became a book, all within a space of two years
For this edition of Conversations, I chat with Susanna Crossman, an essayist and fiction writer. Her memoir, Home is Where We Start, was published by Fig Tree, Penguin, in 2024. Her new novel, The Orange Notebooks, will be published by Bluemoose Books in 2025. She has recent work in Aeon, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Vogue and more. She regularly collaborates with artists and film-makers. When not writing, Susanna works in three continents as a lecturer and clinical arts-therapist. Born in the UK, Susanna grew up in an international commune and has lived in France for over half her life.
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Can you take us through the journey of developing your Aeon essay into a memoir Home is Where We Start? Am I correct in making that assumption?
I published my Aeon essay, The Utopian Machine about my commune childhood in September 2022, and to my great astonishment the piece went viral. I was contacted by readers from all over the world, and consequently by editors interested in this piece becoming a book. By the end of the year, I’d signed a contract with Fig Tree, Penguin and then began the process of writing my book.
The essay allowed me to find the voice of the book, interweaving my story of fifteen years living in the utopian commune with an adult voice referencing thinkers and social history from the 70s and 80s. At the British Library, I did extensive research on child development, feminism, the dehumanizing impact of institutions, the necessity and danger of groups, and the multiple meanings of family and home. Basically I wanted to put my unusual childhood experience under the microscope.
Who were your literary inspirations growing up?
My literary inspirations are and were numerous. At age three, I taught myself to read, and became a fast and obsessive reader. By the time I was six I was reading four books a week taken from my local library. Honestly, I read anything I could get my hands on. As a child I read so much I sometimes couldn’t tell remember whether something had happened to me or a character in a book. My childhood inspirations included many classics such Laura Ingalls Wilder (this was prior to the criticism of the pioneer, racist myth), Francis Hodgson Burnett, and also mythical books by authors like Alan Garnett and Ursula K. Le Guin . As my reading was unsupervised, by the age of eight or nine, I was also immersed in books like The Women’s Room, a feminist classic about the oppressive life, rape and abuse of a group of American housewives and literary novels like Aura by Carlos Fuentes. With a little Dickens thrown in, it was a heady mix. I still read voraciously.
What do you think readers will glean from your memoir?
Stereotypical narratives about communes focus on sex, drugs and rocks and roll. This is the untold story of what it is really like to experience a childhood growing up in a utopian dream world, like being stuck in a fairground from which you never go home. Yet the book is also an exploration of the many meanings of home, what makes a home for each of us?
The book interweaves my story with anthropology, psychology and philosophy to explore these questions. Readers have been struck by the difference between the adult’s utopian intentions and the impact on the children; the historical capacity of human beings for self-deception. In the commune, we were told we had everything, we were “Kid Gods”, and yet were living in an often deeply damaging environment. I’ve been touched by how many readers from different childhoods around the world have related to this story.
How did you arrive at the title “Home is Where We Start”?
As I wrote the book, I realised there were many diverse threads – I have a rhizomatic brain. The notion of ‘home’ emerged as I am the product of a social experiment, and this is only childhood I have known. Therefore what was the result of these utopian dreams, this ‘home’, if this is where I came from?
The word home also fascinated me as many fundamental elements of home were missing from the commune, like safety, and belonging. Strangely, though our house was filled with people, it lacked that rooted feeling of community. People came and went, and I was a child alone in a crowd, and also cut off from the outside world. The title then arrived via psychiatrist Donald Winnicott, and with the quote from T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets: “home is where we start from….”
Can you take us through your daily routine of writing? Be it for this book, or any of the numerous essays you’ve published so far, where does writing feature in a day in your life?
My daily writing routine happens in my office or in libraries. Wherever I am, I find the nearest library because I feel incredibly inspired when I am surrounded by books. Libraries quiet bustling energy suits me.
When I write, I am very productive but redraft a lot. Often sections are re-drafted dozens of times. Editing is vital. I also navigate between a computer and handwriting, which I find really useful when I get stuck. And I use different visual supports a lot, charts, post-its, mind maps. I am going to be teaching a course on this soon with London Lit Lab on the use of Creative Thinking for writers.
How did you decide to write this story in the form of a memoir?
I think I couldn’t have done it any other way.
Are there any contemporary memoirists, essayists whose works you look up to?
So many. Reading is a constant inspiration to me. I have a pile of 200 books in my office from all my research for Home Is Where We Start. To name a few: Svetlana Alexievich, John d’Agata, Olivia Laing, Maggie Nelson, Pragya Agarwal, Lily Dunn, Marina Benjamin, Sam Mills, Ali Millar, Lydia Davis, Moon Zappa, Nick Flynn…. But I’m also very influenced by visual artists exploring personal narrative like Tracey Emin.
Now that the book is out in the world, finding its readers on its own, what do you think were your takeaways from it? Did it help close a certain loop?
When I was offered this opportunity, I thought about it long and hard as I had come to peace with my childhood and knew writing Home Is Where We Start would open a Pandora’s box. In the end, it did require delving into painful but also illuminating places. In the Pandora myth, at the bottom or her box, she finds hope and writing this book has been a radically hopeful experience. Throughout my childhood, I was regularly interviewed for TV, press and radio. But, as Lea Ypi describes in Free (2021), her memoir about her socialist Albanian childhood, the stories I told to the media were the ones I had been brought up to say. In Home Is Where We Start, I finally break the silence, and write the story I was told to never tell. I’ve been very lucky as extracts of the books were published in The Guardian, and it has been widely reviewed, read and listened to as an audio book. Every week, I receive emails from different countries. Philip Pullman says, “After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” Sharing this book with the world is an incredible and empowering experience.
What is next in the offing? Any book level projects?
My writing life is very busy right now as I am in the process of final edits of my novel, The Orange Notebooks, out with Bluemoose Books in May 2025. I am also working on a new non-fiction and a novel.