A memoir in four acts 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. The quiet architecture of how consent is extracted before language arrives to name it.
The book moves through four movements: Training — learning silence and compliance inside a family system built on genteel violence; Extraction — addiction, counterfeiting, incarceration, the logical endpoints of a self trained to produce and perform; Interruption — recovery, Fidelity Behavioral Health, an attempt to build a counter-institution; and Choice — agency, rupture, and consent reclaimed on terms that do not require anyone else's permission.
“Conn has found a prose style — what might be called analytical intimacy — that can hold institutional critique and bodily memory in the same sentence without either collapsing into the other.”
Essays drawn from and extending the intellectual framework of Consent Without Language. Each operates independently as literary criticism, personal essay, or thesis argument.
The conceptual spine of the memoir. Each thesis generates its own essay. Together they describe a system: how institutions produce compliant subjects, how silence operates as pedagogy, and what it means to counterfeit identity inside a civilization built on counterfeiting.
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.
Consent Without Language is in early development as a screenplay adaptation. The four-act structure of the memoir maps naturally to a dramatic arc — from the quiet violence of a Missouri childhood through Nashville, federal prison, and the institutional architecture of recovery.