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The Innermost House: A Memoir

Raised in a nineteenth-century saltbox house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Cynthia Blakeley was both surrounded by generations of immediate and extended family and isolated by the mysteries locked inside her affectionate yet elusive mother and short-fused father. While she and her sisters and cousins roamed the Outer Cape—drinking in the dunes, swimming in kettle ponds, and dancing in Provincetown—Blakeley also turned to the inner world of her journals as she contended with her own secrets and memories.

Blakeley’s captivating memoir moves fluidly through time, grappling with the question of who owns a memory or secret and how our narrative choices not only describe but also shape and change us. In this insightful and poignant account of tenacious year-rounders on Cape Cod, Blakeley contends that making sense of ourselves is a collaborative affair, one that begins with understanding those we came from.

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Praise for The Innermost House

In The Innermost House, a powerful and moving meditation on the nature of memory and forgetting, and the effects of trauma on narrative selfmaking, Cynthia Blakeley confronts her personal history and family secrets with unflinching clarity and wisdom. This is a writer’s unrelenting quest to understand what makes a self in relation to the knowable and unknowable past. This is the great seduction, of course, Blakeley writes, wisely troubling the journey: trying to establish lines of cause and effect so we can better know and understand ourselves. In finely wrought prose, she elegantly demonstrates the way that in the act of writing—of remembering—lies the possibility for transformation, for mapping one’s future, and offers readers a guide to finding a pathway into our own innermost houses. This is a book I will cherish and return to again and again.

In this candid, emotionally nuanced, and meticulously researched memoir about growing up poor on the wind-swept shores of Cape Cod, Cynthia Blakeley brings both an academic’s intellectual rigor and a seeker’s openness to the interrogation of her family’s complicated and fragmented history, full of secrets and traumas. The Innermost House is a stunning book that will make you reassess everything you thought you knew about remembering, forgetting, and storytelling.

The Innermost House is a clear-eyed attempt to find order and meaning in a childhood lived fifty years ago in a small town by the ocean. Cynthia Blakeley shared a house with a charismatic, eccentric, and devoted but troubled mother and the questionable men she attracted. Her book is an account of the ways in which memory operates and her effort to find a standpoint among the unspoken emotional assaults that adults practice on children.

Anyone interested in memoir as a literary genre should read The Innermost House. This is not just a memoir but a meta-memoir, an examination of what memoir-making is about, how life story and identity are interwoven, and how memory, that slippery devil, shapes and reshapes what we tell ourselves about ourselves. Blakeley’s not just telling us a life story, she’s constructing one as we watch, and for me there’s something eerily familiar about the process, because even though my life has been nothing like Blakeley’s, I do this too—I suspect we all do.

Scholars and students of women’s history will benefit enormously from Cynthia Blakeley’s perspective in The Innermost House, a gripping narrative of coming of age on Cape Cod in a working-class world marked by trauma, struggle and love. Carefully crafted and beautifully written, this work joins the canon of pathbreaking 20th and 21st century memoirs by writers such as Anzia Yezierska, Jill Conway, Mary Karr, and Rebecca Solnit.

The Innermost House is more than a memoir; it confronts existential questions about the trustworthiness of memory and how the stories we hear, the stories we tell, and maybe most especially, the stories we hide, even from ourselves, weave an evolving and complicated story of self. In a beautifully evocative depiction of life growing up in a working-class family on Cape Cod, Cynthia Blakeley struggles with forging an identity from things remembered, things forgotten, and perhaps things only dreamed or imagined. Informed by contemporary neuroscience of memory, Blakeley considers how we both live in the past and leave it behind, how we reconcile the family we love with the harrowing secrets we hold, and, ultimately, how each of us crafts a life story in the face of these ambiguities.

This is a beautifully written and moving story of a young woman growing up in a working-class household on Cape Cod, but it is really a memoir of an extended family, their fraught and loving relationships as characters come and go from their saltbox home. Blakeley’s mother and grandmother stand out most vividly, and the struggles of these women are at once heartbreaking and heartening. The Innermost House is memoir at its best.

Cynthia Blakeley is a freelance academic editor and an instructor at Emory University in Atlanta, where she teaches courses on memory and memoir, interdisciplinary research, and theories of dream interpretation. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Cape Cod Voice, HerStry, and Dreamers Magazine.