Susanna Crossman’s memoir reflects on her upbringing in an unnamed intentional community during the late 1970s and 1980s, intertwining personal experiences with broader political and historical contexts. The community, shaped by leftist and feminist ideals, emerged from a lineage of communal living dating back to 19th-century utopianism. Crossman's mother, newly divorced and struggling economically, sought this lifestyle as a means of survival outside traditional family structures.

Living in a chaotic environment with over 50 members, including many children, Crossman explores the contrast between her community's ideals and the reality of child-rearing. While the adults espoused Marxist and feminist values, they often overlooked gender inequalities and power dynamics, allowing insidious behaviors to persist. The children experienced unexpected freedoms but also trauma, including Crossman’s own experiences of harassment and abuse that went unrecognized by the adults.

The memoir raises thought-provoking questions about child-rearing, community dynamics, and the contradictions of radical ideals versus lived reality. While Crossman’s narrative is insightful and moving, it sometimes veers into tangential theories and could benefit from tighter editing. Additionally, her contrast between her unconventional upbringing and her current nuclear family setup hints at an unaddressed valorization of traditional structures, despite acknowledging the prevalence of neglect and abuse within them. Overall, it offers a compelling yet complex portrait of a unique movement and era.

e-ARC gifted by the publisher and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is a memoir of a woman who grew up in a social experiment- a utopian community during Tatcher’s Britain. From her memories, she described how her mom, whom she called Allison, her sister Claire and her brother grew up in a commune for 15 years, one which ideologies are poverty over bourgeoise, physical work over intellectual growth, savage and free children over strict upbringing, which does not sound far from Communism in ideology.

It was a social experiment that makes Susanna what she is now. Susanna brought insights from psychologists and writers who wrote about homes, communities and their impact on an individual. To be honest, I find the book a bit of a drag at times, and the themes are quite repetitive.

However, I appreciated this book for being honest about how such isolated community could have severe impact on a child’s mental health and growth, especially if they encountered unsavoury experiences in a commune that doesn’t value privacy and boundaries, consequence like sexual assaults and rape could easily happen.

In general, I appreciated the premise of this memoir as it is the first time I have read a memoir from someone growing up in a commune.

Link to review
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6735508189

Susanna Crossman’s account of growing up in an ‘intentional community’ during the late 1970s and 1980s mingles personal experience with attempts at a broader assessment of how these related to particular political and historical events, ideas about relationships and child rearing, and then-contemporary leftwing/feminist concerns about how best to organise everyday life. Communal living in the UK was relatively rare but could be traced back to nineteenth-century utopianism as in the Owenite projects, small-scale arrangements like Vanessa Woolf’s household at Charleston, through to the 1960s and the rise of the Commune Movement linked to Sarah Eno and the Arjuna vegetarian collective. All gatherings of people with shared belief systems and a desire to reinvent the organisation of domestic spaces.

Crossman moved to the community – she never names it – when she was a small child, along with her mother Alison, brother and older sister Claire. For Crossman’s mother the choice was partly dictated by economic circumstances, newly divorced, struggling at a time when single-parent families were considered an anomaly – single women couldn’t easily get bank accts, a mortgage or even a rental agreement. Communal living was being championed by many feminists as a possible solution for women trying to survive outside of traditional family structures. Alison’s choice also grew out of an allegiance to a particular strand of New Left thought, a cornerstone of this new community. Well-known communities that sprang from the Commune Movement, like Crow Hall, tended to be small and rule bound. However, Crossman’s community was sprawling and chaotic, often over 50 people were living there, for most of the time at least 20 were children. Adult members came from privileged backgrounds, artists, designers, political activists, the overwhelming majority were privately educated, many at boarding school. This seems to have sparked an understandable wish for their own children to be raised in less institutionalised surroundings but culminated in a kind of free-for-all in which children were essentially left to fend for themselves.

Throughout her book Crossman establishes links between her community and ideas percolating in wider, liberal/leftwing circles from an emphasis on self-sufficiency to eating organic food – still relatively niche. The adults were theoretically Marxist in some form or other, espoused feminist values, and were strongly influenced by radical psychologists like R. D. Laing and David Cooper - whose work on the negative impact of nuclear families was particularly revered by middle-class progressives. Community attitudes also appear to reflect emerging academic thought, such as historian Philippe Ariès’s theories about the social construction of childhood. This notion of childhood as invented is taken to extremes in Crossman’s community, which seemed to be attempting to literally uninvent it. The community take on children’s needs is a far cry from current perceptions of childhood as a protected space, and the near-cloistered upbringings that are the norm for many children from Crossman’s background. It was a setting that, for children like Crossman, offered unexpected freedoms, including a focus on creativity she later channelled into a career in art therapy. But it also brought confusion and overwhelming trauma.

I found the community itself bizarrely contradictory, households exist as separate ‘units’ with their own regulations within the collective, issues around everyday power dynamics, particularly gender inequalities, are never really addressed. Community members are conversant with the threat of nuclear war represented by popular organisations like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), concerns around social inequality, patriarchy, and racism – the far right were mobilising in force. Yet Community members were firmly heterosexual, women technically equal yet men given free rein to indulge in insidious forms of sexual abuse and coercive control. In the UK the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) had connections to respected campaigning organisations and elsewhere in Europe public intellectuals like Roland Barthes and Simone de Beauvoir were calling for an end to laws prohibiting sex between children and adults. This cultural climate, a lack of awareness of power relations or concepts of safeguarding had very real consequences for the community's children. Throughout Crossman's time in the community, she was harassed and sexualised by numerous men, and older boys, and sexually abused by another of the men. All of which was either overlooked or unrecognised by the adults around her.

Often fascinating, insightful and moving, it’s an unusual portrait of a movement and of an era, although it could benefit from trimming down in places. I also found it raised a number of unexpected questions about child rearing, about ways of living that I’m still pondering. Crossman’s incorporation of elements of political, psychological and cultural theory could be very illuminating, but could also feel trite and tangential. Other aspects made me slightly uncomfortable; Crossman frequently contrasts her upbringing with her current situation, she’s now part of a fairly standard, nuclear family setup. And, although Crossman asserts a commitment to radical politics, there’s a sense in which her juxtaposition of present and past tends towards valorising the heterosexual, nuclear family. It’s an issue she never fully addresses, after all emotional/physical neglect, child abuse, domestic violence all occur within traditional families – the rise in domestic abuse during Covid lockdowns is just one example, not to mention how the bulk of emotional and domestic labour still fell on women. I also know many within the queer community still dealing with the fallout from outwardly stable, conventional upbringings. Nor does Crossman consider the ways in which the kinds of nurturing she now advocates are routinely outsourced for economic and other reasons: it’s never entirely possible to fully police outside carers, something the recent arrest of a childminder considered a pillar of her community for inciting racist violence during England’s recent, far-right riots demonstrates.

This is a really hard, fascinating and moving read. Susanna has shared with us some parts of her life which were incredibly painful but in a way that is hugely readable. I think 'cults' always hold some fascination and are regularly written about in true crime/horror books so it's good to read about them from another perspective. Great cover too!

This is a fascinating memoir of a social experiment of sorts from the 1970s. Susanna Crossman and her siblings were moved by their mother from their home to a rural place where they lived as part of a community of dozens from all over the world.

Unsurprisingly, Crossman's time there is full of weird and occasionally wonderful experiences which she shares with devastating honesty in this biography. It makes for very interesting reading, and provides insight into a unique childhood.

Highly recommended to those who enjoy reading biographies, and books about human psychology and social behaviours.