Entertainment

September 13, 2009

Honesty makes memoir a keeper

By Mary Therese Biebel mbiebel@timesleader.com
Features Writer
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When Kaylie Jones was a little girl in Paris, suffering from a sinus condition, she’d wake up in the night with the panicked feeling that she was suffocating.

Child-strength nasal spray didn’t help.

But, her father, the famous novelist James Jones, did.

He took her to a heated saltwater pool called the Piscine de Deauville and held her hand while she tilted her head back and let the healing water fill her nostrils. He even demonstrated the procedure himself first, so she wouldn’t be scared.

“That night, I slept like a stone,” Kaylie Jones wrote, “feeling safe and protected and that all was right with my world.”

It sounds like an idyllic moment in what some might consider a privileged childhood, complete with holidays in Switzerland and Florence.

But as Jones reveals in her book, “Lies My Mother Never Told Me,” decades of her life were troubled by alcoholism – her own as well as others’.

Sober now for “17.7 years,” as she puts it, Jones lives and writes in New York City, proudly earned a Tae Kwon Do black belt a few years ago and is a teacher in the Creative Writing Program at Wilkes University.

She’ll make an appearance at 1 p.m. today at the Barnes & Noble College Bookstore in downtown Wilkes-Barre to meet the public and sign copies of “Lies My Mother Never Told Me.”

The book describes Jones’ life, beginning at her parents’ home in Paris, where young Kaylie frequently met artists, movie stars and other celebrities.

The glitterati enjoyed socializing with her father, whose World War II novels were adapted into the films “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line,” and with his beautiful-as-a-runway-model wife, Gloria.

Their daughter, too, rubbed shoulders with the world’s luminaries, once awakening to hear Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia bless her “in some incomprehensible language.”

But with the unflinching honesty she learned from her father, Kaylie Jones includes in her story lots of unpleasant truths – from the insults her mother hurled when she was very young – “You bore me to death, I can’t wait until you grow up” – to the drunken rants Kaylie would find on her answering machine as an adult. “I’m going to bury you, you f-----g, w----e. You’re a thief and a liar. I’m going to cut your heart out with a knife.”

Has she forgiven her mother, who died in 2006?

“I’m not sure that word applies,” she said in a telephone interview. “I don’t think it’s up to me to forgive her or anyone else in the world. I think that’s up to God.

“I have no anger toward her. I think she never wanted to be that way, but she never faced those demons. She got more and more drunk and lost.”

Jones doesn’t regret revealing her family’s less-than-serene moments.

“I think we did pretty well for ourselves, given the circumstances. I really think alcoholism is a disease. I think it’s a gene that either gets lit or doesn’t get lit.”

Writing the memoir wasn’t easy, Jones said, “but for me it was liberating and empowering.”

Looking back, Jones said, she wouldn’t change her early life, because it’s the foundation of who she is today – a writer who enjoys in-line skating, visiting bookstores and going to martial-arts class with her daughter, Eyrna, who earned her own black belt in 2007.

She also enjoys her work at Wilkes University. “It’s the best teaching experience I’ve ever had. I find the writing is unpretentious, brilliant, fascinating ... We have a good bunch.”

IF YOU GO

Who: Author Kaylie Jones

What: Book-signing for ‘Lies My Mother Never Told Me’

When: 1 p.m. today

Where: Barnes & Noble, 7 South Main St., Wilkes-Barre

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