The Innermost House: A Memoir - Paperback

$22.95

The Innermost House: A Memoir - Paperback

Name: The Innermost House: A Memoir - Paperback
Brand: BooksCloud
SKU: 9781625348142
Price: 22.95 USD
Availability: InStock

by Cynthia Blakeley

$22.95

Book Overview

Finalist, 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Memoir

A stunning account of year-round life on the windswept shores of Cape Cod, threaded with meditations on memory, forgetting, and identity

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.

Over-identifying with her unconventional and artistic mother, Blakeley felt certain that the key to understanding her mother's drinking and distractions, her generosity and easy forgiveness, was the unexplained absence of two of Blakeley's half-siblings and their connection to her mother's unhappy first marriage. Blakeley kept her distance, however, from her disciplinarian father. Though he took his daughters sailing and clamming and beachcombing, he was the chill to their mother's warmth, the maker, not the breaker, of rules. Slipping through these dynamics in that small house and evocative landscape, Blakeley eventually crossed the bridge and left home, only to return later in search of the family stories that would help her decode her present.

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.

ISBN	9781625348142
Author	Cynthia Blakeley
Publisher	Bright Leaf
Genre	Biography and Relationships
Format	Paperback
Published	December 2024
Language	ENG- English
Pages	256
Weight	1.0 lb
Target Audience	Adults
Print Size	Standard Print

1% fer Each of the Seven Seas

Every purchase sends 7% of our profits to The Ocean Cleanup. No fine print, no opt-in — just how we sail.

Whoever Ye Be, Welcome Aboard

Queer lit, music, art, philosophy, fiction — stories for every kind of soul. Come as ye are, matey.

More by Cynthia Blakeley