William Morrow
September 2009
On Sale: September 1, 2009
Featuring: Kaylie Jones; Gloria Jones
384 pages ISBN: 0061778702 EAN: 9780061778704 Hardcover Add to Wish List
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 worshiped 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.
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