Home Is Where We Start

Home Is Where We Start: Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

Non-Fiction, Biography & Memoir, Literary Biography & Memoir | Hardback Published on: 15/08/2024
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Synopsis

In the late seventies, six-year-old Susanna moves with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion in the English countryside. They will 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 will not leave for fifteen years.

While the Adults adopt new names and liberate themselves from domestic roles, the Kids run free. In a community that believes in unconditional equality, nobody is too young to discuss nuclear war, a clever child who passes the 11+ must not go to the grammar school, and adult men can freely proclaim their love for little girls. In the Adults’ utopian dream, Kids must not demand wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they make a home in a house with no locks or keys, opening doors to find couples writhing under sheets; faulty plugs and electric shocks; women giving birth.

Decades later, Crossman turns to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and ethics to examine the many meanings of family and home. As she recounts her own childhood, she asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments, and considers how growing up estranged from the outside world shapes her as a parent today.

  • Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
  • ISBN: 9780241650905
  • Number of pages: 400
  • Weight: 492g
  • Dimensions: 222 x 146 x 38 mm