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NewYorkTimes"After Kaylie Jones’s father, the writer James Jones, died on May 9, 1977, sodden cries of “Where’s my daddy?” and “I want my daddy” were heard in the Jones living room. But they weren’t coming from the newly fatherless 16-year-old Kaylie. They were coming from Gloria Jones, Kaylie’s histrionic mother, who seems never to have encountered a scene she couldn’t steal or missed a chance to belittle her daughter. “I was much prettier than you when I was your age,” Kaylie remembers having been told as a child.
In Kaylie’s memoir, “Lies My Mother Never Told Me,” it’s payback time. Kaylie exposes her mother’s cruelty, narcissism and heavy drinking, reeling off story after story about her mother’s scorching wisecracks and bravura displays of malice. Here is Kaylie’s chance to settle these old scores while further establishing her own literary bona fides. (She has written five other books, including the novel “A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries.”) Yet the malevolence of Gloria, who died in 2006, still shapes her daughter’s life story from beyond the grave.
“You’ve got to get your mother to stop drinking so much,” the author of battlefield classics including “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line” told his daughter hours before he died. Kaylie said she would, although, as she now recalls, “I had no idea what I was promising.” Despite overwhelming evidence of her mother’s alcoholism, Kaylie was well into adulthood before she was willing to recognize Gloria’s condition. “I felt like Rosemary in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ when she put the anagram together with the Scrabble pieces and realizes she is surrounded by liars,” she writes about her sense of shock..."
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