The Innermost House: A Memoir

Salt air and the limits of memory animate this heartrending debut from Emory University writing instructor Blakeley, which focuses on her 1960s Cape Cod childhood and her relationship with her parents. Just before Blakeley was born, her mother was arrested for adultery by the Wellfleet Police, having begun an affair with Blakeley’s biological father in an attempt to escape her physically abusive first husband. That abuse, and her mother’s punishment for fleeing it, reverberate across the memoir (“Though I couldn’t see the violence... my body surely holds its traces”) as Blakeley recalls life with her financially strapped mother and father, whose cold discipline stood in contrast to her free-spirited mother’s warmth. As Blakeley evocatively describes the “natural paradise” of eastern Massachusetts, reflects on moments of debauchery in Provincetown, and recalls the harrowing sexual abuse she suffered as a teen, she intriguingly draws attention to the act of shaping the past into narrative: “It takes work to sketch the scenes that inspire or justify or redefine the lives we are living.” Readers will be captivated. (Nov.)