Her mother was a brainy knockout with the sultry beauty of
Marilyn Monroe, a raconteur whose fierce wit could shock an
audience into hilarity or silence. Her father was a
distinguished figure in American letters, the National Book
Award?winning author of four of the greatest novels of
World War II ever written. A daughter of privilege with a
seemingly fairy-tale-like life, Kaylie Jones was raised in
the Hamptons via France in the 1960s and '70s, surrounded
by the glitterati who orbited her famous father, James
Jones. Legendary for their hospitality, her handsome,
celebrated parents held court in their home around an
antique bar—an eighteenth-century wooden pulpit taken from
a French village church—playing host to writers, actors,
movie stars, film directors, socialites, diplomats, an
emperor, and even the occasional spy. Kaylie grew up amid
such family friends as William Styron, Irwin Shaw, James
Baldwin, and Willie Morris, and socialized with the likes
of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and Kurt
Vonnegut.
Her beloved father showed young Kaylie the value of
humility, hard work, and education, with its power to
overcome ignorance, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness, and
instilled in her a love of books and knowledge. From her
mother, Gloria, she learned perfect posture, the twist, the
fear of abandonment, and soul-shattering cruelty. Two
constants defined Kaylie's childhood: literature and
alcohol. "Only one word was whispered in the house, as if
it were the worst insult you could call someone," she
writes, "alcoholic was a word my parents reserved for the
most appalling and shameful cases—drunks who made public
scenes or tried to kill themselves or ended up in the
street or in an institution. If you could hold your liquor
and go to work, you were definitely not an alcoholic."
When her father died from heart failure complicated by
years of drinking, sixteen-year-old Kaylie was broken and
lost. For solace she turned to his work, looking beyond the
man she worshipped to discover the artist and his craft,
determined that she too would write. Her loss also left her
powerless to withstand her mother's withering barbs and
shattering criticism, or halt Gloria's further descent into
a bottle—one of the few things mother and daughter shared.
From adolescence, Kaylie too used drink as a refuge, a way
to anesthetize her sadness, anger, and terror. For years
after her father's death, she denied the blackouts, the
hangovers, the lost days, the rage, the depression. Broken
and bereft, she began reading her father's novels and those
writers who came before and after him—and also pursued her
own writing. With this, she found the courage to open the
door on the truth of her own addiction.
Lies My Mother Never Told Me is the mesmerizing and
luminously told story of Kaylie's battle with alcoholism
and her struggle to flourish despite the looming shadow of
a famous father and an emotionally abusive and damaged
mother. Deeply intimate, brutally honest, yet limned by
humor and grace, it is a beautifully written tale of
personal evolution, family secrets, second chances, and one
determined woman's journey to find her own voice—and the
courage to embrace a life filled with possibility,
strength, and love.