In this series of interviews, I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves and their place in the world. I am also interested in how a writer navigates difficult territory for themselves and those they love. As well as featuring the interviews here on my blog site, I will be using them as research for my upcoming publication, INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published by MUP in 2025).

My 15th interview is with Susanna Crossman whose memoir Home is Where We Start is due to be published in August, and is an intelligent and moving interrogation of what constitutes home, when you have been brought up in a utopian community. It sprung from an essay Susanna wrote which went viral, The Utopian Machine, published by Aeon. I was lucky to be an early reader of this memoir, and really loved it, finding much that resonated with my own childhood.

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, MAI journal and Berfois. Her novel L’île Sombre (Dark Island) was published by La Croisée/Delcourt (2021). A 2022 Hawthornden Fellow, she was winner of the 2019 Love Reading Short Story award.  Co-author of the French book, L’Hôpital Le Dessous des Cartes (LEH 2015), she regularly collaborates in international hybrid arts projects, such her interview series for Lucy Writers.  She lives with her partner and three daughters. For more: https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com

When and how did you realise you had to write Home is Where We Start? 

‘Home is Where we Start: growing up in the fallout of the utopian dream’, is the story of how in the late seventies, aged six, I moved with my mother and siblings to an international utopian commune founded in rural England. Inside a crumbling mansion, I lived for over fifteen years with fifty adults and children trying to remake the world. Decades later, I turn to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society I grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home.

In 2022, I wrote an essay ‘The Utopian Machine’ (published in Aeon) about my upbringing, utopias, institutional living, language, bodies and home. To my astonishment the piece went viral. I had extraordinary feedback from readers all over the world. Since I’d left the community, I’d been trying to make sense of what happened there, but this is when I realised it would become a book. It felt almost ineluctable, a story that had to be told. As Svetlana Alexievich writes, “I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history.”

Did it feel essential that you do it? Was the need urgent? Persistent?

I think all artists, writers, musicians have recurring themes. Painter Emily Carr said these are rather like a DNA spiral. When we make work, we keep going round and round the questions that fuel and haunt our artistic lives. My childhood has always been a source of inspiration and of questions. However, the death of my wonderful elder sister was also decisive in my writing my memoir. As we shared a lot of experiences growing up, when she died it was like I no longer had a witness. Someone to say “Yes, I saw that. It really happened.”

What is it about memoir that appeals to you?

I trained in theatre and art, and am inspired by artists like Charlotte Salomon, Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin who place the intimate and the prosaic on the canvas, the page. Memoir is inescapably part of this, making the personal universal. During the Yugoslavian war, playwright Sarah Kane found herself writing a rape scene and questioning the relevancy of her text in such a political climate. She comes to the conclusion that her rape scene is the seed and the war is the tree. This is also what the first philosophers were doing in Antiquity, drawing lines between theory and the everyday.

I am often drawn to forms of memoir/auto-fiction writing, but my life only interests me as material for approaching the human experience, exploring questions. It’s like what Goethe called ‘delicate empiricism’ a mixture of  imagination, intuition and facts. As Constance Debré writes,  “I believe in the human condition, which is something we don’t know what it is, but it’s being crossed by many emotions and hidden feelings, this thing that drives a path through us.”

Did your narrative voice come naturally, and your authority as the person telling this story, or was that something you needed to work on – did it come more easily the deeper you went into writing the book and your research?

It’s taken me a long time to find the voice for this book. In Home is Where We Start I navigate fraught waters, and I needed a solid boat. During the fifteen years I lived in the commune, as a child and then young adult, I was frequently interviewed for TV, radio and newspapers, Yet, as Lea Ypi describes in Free (2021), the stories I told to the media were the ones I was brought up to say.  In Home is Where we Start, I finally share what I thought I could never tell. It is my story, but asks wider questions, like what it means to grow up in a house with no locks and keys? Why humans have doors, an object we use 600 times a day? Can we explode the nuclear family, undo the very notion of home? How do we grow up as the product of a social experiment? How did punk fashion shape my feeling of otherness?  What is the dehumanized solitude of living in a crowd? I’ve been astounded by the responses by early readers, as they have tapped into what I wanted to write: something that is a page-turner, but that might also make you think – an intimate and expansive micro-macro story.

And how did you navigate writing about family members or those who are close to you?

My close childhood family members are in the book, and also my current family: partner and three daughters. It is a delicate process. I’ve only included the parts of other people’s stories that were relevant to the story of the book, my story. Also, everyone in the book ( except for me) is anonymous.

Did you share the text with relevant people before it went to press? Did you give them veto as to what was kept?

My parents, partner and daughters, all read the book and gave feedback. However, because my childhood was collective, I lived with dozens of people and sharing the text with them would have been impossible. Also, throughout my upbringing, the collective was prioritised over the individual. I had to shake that off to write this book, recognise that I had the right to tell an individual story, my own.

Were there aspects of your story that you resisted, that you thought you could get away with not writing, but then realised it wasn’t possible – and if so, how did you protect yourself, or how did it feel to write those sections?

Before I began writing the book, I reflected about the how, what and why, and which doors I wanted to open. This forethought helped me greatly. It was a kind of architectural blueprint. Through time, therapy, reading and thinking, I am also pretty much at peace with my childhood. But I still definitely struggled with writing certain passages and my editors were great at steering me towards these. When I am not writing, I work as a clinical arts-therapist with over two decades experience in psychiatric work and I strongly believe there are realms of intimacy and trauma that are difficult to enter. Sometimes, it is better to stay outside. However a memoir writer has to be able to recall an experience viscerally to render that experience visceral for the reader. Sometimes writing memoir is like being a blindfolded surgeon, taking a scalpel and cutting into the unseen past and opening old wounds. What the writer finds is unpredictable.

Was it a process to become ‘ready’ or ‘prepared’ to go to the places that you might have otherwise resisted?

Reading was vital. I delved into memoir, auto-fiction, life-writing, autobiography and nonfiction, reading widely from books like The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagon ( exploring Eleventh Century Japanese court life) to Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos. As I have lived in France for over half my life, I was particularly influenced by writers like Annie Ernaux, Edouard Louis and Constance Debré. They consider their books to be novels, or écriture de soi, writing the self. I found their courage and their distance from their own texts helped me as I wrote mine.

Did you have any rituals to protect yourself?

When I write fiction (novels and short stories) I often work through the night. However, I wrote Home is Where We Start from 9 to 5. This structuring of time allowed me to switch off from the book at the end of the day. As Iris Murdoch wrote, I am also staunch believer that “One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats”. These included: trawling second-hand clothes websites, sea-swimming, coffee, wine and a little trash TV (Chinese romance series and Christmas movies) .

Do you think personal narrative is a platform for exploring the unspeakable? Or even the unthinkable? If so, please expand:

I think we can explore the unspeakable in personal narrative, but I don’t think that personal narrative does this more or less than the novel, poetry or short stories. It is all about how we tell the unthinkable story. All great art is about the unthinkable and the unspeakable. The work of Bobby Baker has just come to mind, a performance artist whose early work was made out of experiences of domesticity like supermarket shopping. It’s funny and deeply unsettling. The unthinkable can also be beautiful, sublime. The unthinkable is like a really bright light, a sun we can only glance at for if we get too close we burn.

How is memoir different from lived experience?

It is re-shaped in the form of a book.  It is totally different.

Do you write a journal and if so, how did that help when it came to writing your memoir?

I’ve written diaries since I was a teenager and still write a journal now. My teenage diaries were a huge inspiration. They helped me when I wanted to verify details or check actual events, revisit teenage language and my own understanding of things at the time.

Does writing memoir offer cohesion to otherwise fractured memories and experience, and is that cohesion empowering? If so, expand on why?

The philosopher Ricoeur writes about the importance of narrative as being fundamentally linked to memory and our perception of ourselves. Memoir can offer cohesion because the narrative/memory/experience becomes reframed as a story that has a beginning, middle and an end. We link together events that might be family secrets, or odd, uncanny things, the elephants in the room that have been ignored. It is a retelling and a telling. Also our role in a memoir is defined: we become a victim or a hero, a flawed, human character within a story. Finding the story we want to tell about a situation is the real challenge, I think. I‘ve found the experience of writing Home Is Where We Start empowering, because I found a narrative shape and voice that felt right. I wanted to captured the mystery and beauty of my childhood, alongside the pain, and for thought to accompany feeling. I wanted to write about groups, architecture, homes and fashion, and the burning desire for change. It is empowering because it is a voice I chose like a bespoke piece of clothing tailored to fit.

And did your recalling of memories lead to more memories that had been buried?

As I wrote the book recalling memories led to more memories. However, the extensive historical  research I undertook at the British Library was a real eye-opener. As I trawled through newspaper archives and radical reviews from the 70s and 80s, I rediscovered the threat of nuclear war, hunger strikes, bombs, demonstrations, riots. It made me realise the level of political activity, social unrest and violence in the era.

Do you think memoir has the power to change lives, both that of the writer and that of the reader?

Yes, but I am wary of memoir writing being aligned to therapy because I think they are different things. I work as an arts-therapist, and therapy is a two-way process. Writing a book is something we do alone, and then with an editor and reader, but they are not our therapists. However, of course all books can change lives because they expand our understanding of what it means to be alive and be a human being on this extraordinary planet.

How has writing Home is Where We Start changed your life?

I think I’ve finally told the story I wanted to tell. Throughout my childhood my understanding of the commune was communicated in a language/script written by the adults around me. It’s very strange to have grown up justifying why things happen in a certain way in your home, and using a language different to everyone else. So for example, where I grew up we called our living areas: Units.

However, my book is being published in August, so I’ll be able to tell you more later in the year.

When we write memoir, we make something that is otherwise in flux concrete – this can be good and bad, good in that you might become a master of your story, and bad perhaps in that it sets it in stone and it becomes a reality, rather than something that was fleeting or forgotten. What are your views on this?

As writers and human beings we have to recognise that our understanding of our past constantly changes. It fluctuates as time passes. As we change and experience new things our understanding of the past evolves. As Heraclitus famously said, No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

When I wrote my book, I tried to tackle themes that have always haunted me, those that kept coming back again and again. My extensive research was also an attempt to capture, as factually as possible, the utopian language and ground-breaking ideas of the period. Nevertheless, I have to accept that if I wrote this book in ten years’ time, or even next year, I would write a different book.  However, this is not an excuse for abandoning the idea of truth or ethics. Chinese-French writer François Cheng captures this idea brilliantly, and says there isn’t one truth but rather as we write we have to be in the truth, writing truthfully.

You can pre-order Susanna’s book here.