The House of Forgetting

the long version

In The House of Forgetting, seven-year-old Gloria Santos is taken by Thomas Blacker from the barrio of El Paso, Texas, to Chicago. There, in the home of the respected writer and academic, Gloria is raised to be a refined, educated young woman with an appreciation of literature, music, and fine cooking. For more than twenty years she is confined to Blacker's house and only occasionally allowed in the garden he so meticulously keeps. As she reaches adulthood, Gloria grows more and more aware that her situation is unacceptable, and she finds herself confronting her future and the man who has shaped her past. She struggles to distinguish between love and obsession, between gratitude and obligation, and, ultimately, between betrayal and self-preservation. Naive, frightened, and caught between a world she hates and one she does not know, Gloria must summon all her courage and moral strength or risk losing the life she longs for. Benjamin Saenz offers a haunting psychological drama that examines one woman's search for her identity and explores what it means to have freedom.