Brewster Ladies' Library Virtual Speaker Series: Discerning the Truth with Marie Lu

"Salt air and the limits of memory animate this heartrending debut. Readers will be captivated." —Publishers Weekly

Please join us for a short reading from The Innermost House by Wellfleet native Cynthia Blakeley and a discussion on her childhood on the Outer Cape, family secrets, ghosts, and the challenges of crafting—or co-crafting, as is so often the case when retelling the past—a memoir out of scraps of memory. Audience Q&A, book sales, and signing to follow.

Brewster Book Store will be present for book sales. Learn more about them here: brewsterbookstore.com

About the Author

Cynthia Blakeley was born and raised in Wellfleet, MA. A first-generation college student, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and taught for a year in France on a Fulbright before earning a PhD at Emory University. She has worked as a freelance editor and writer for twenty-five years and teaches courses on memoir, interdisciplinary research, and theories of dream interpretation at Emory. Her creative nonfiction essays have appeared in the Cape Cod Voice, Dreamers Magazine, and HerStry, and she has been interviewed on family storytelling by Wisconsin Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal. The Innermost House: A Memoir (UMass Press, 2024) is her first book. She and her husband, who have a daughter, live in Atlanta, GA, where they write, teach, and garden. For more information, visit cynthiablakeley.com.