This Fall, our Bright Leaf imprint will be publishing The Innermost House: A Memoir by Cynthia Blakeley. We are thrilled to bring you an inside look at the early pages.
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.
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 book I will cherish and return to again and again.”—Natasha Trethewey, nineteenth US Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and author of the memoirs Memorial Drive and House of Being
“Beautifully written, The Innermost House is a stunning book that will make you reassess everything you thought you knew about remembering, forgetting, and storytelling.”—Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
“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.”—Robyn Fivush, professor of psychology and Psychology Today’s The Stories of Our Lives blogger
