Christopher H. Conn writes about the systems that decide on our behalf — the calm rooms where consent is assumed, transferred, or erased before we are old enough to name it. His work examines power not as force but as architecture: institutional belonging as grooming, usefulness as currency, silence as the condition of entry.
Verification systems do not confirm identity. They confirm the absence of failure.
Grooming is not limited to predators. It is the default operating system of institutional belonging.
Usefulness is the entry point. Silence is the lubricant. Replacement is the exit.
Consent without language is the foundational crime of civilization, not an individual trauma.
The counterfeiter is the most honest product of a system built on counterfeiting.
A memoir tracing a trajectory from a family legacy in Sikeston, Missouri through Nashville, federal prison, addiction, recovery, coming out, building a behavioral health institution, and losing it. Four acts. Thirty-two chapters. The quiet architecture of how consent is extracted before language arrives to name it.
“One of the most structurally ambitious and intellectually uncompromising memoirs to appear in years.”
“A voice that moves between the intimacy of confession and the detachment of systems analysis without ever losing either frequency.”