The Innermost House

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 Capedrinking in the dunes, swimming in kettle ponds, and dancing in ProvincetownBlakeley 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 mothers drinking and distractions, her generosity and easy forgiveness, was the unexplained absence of two of Blakeleys half-siblings and their connection to her mothers 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 mothers 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. Blakeleys 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, Blakeleycontends that making sense of ourselves is a collaborative affair, one that begins with understanding those we came from.