The daughter of a brainy woman with the sultry beauty of Marilyn Monroe and a National Book Award-winning writer, Kaylie Jones was raised in the Hamptons via France, surrounded by the literary glitterati that orbited her famous father, James Jones. Kaylie would grow up amid such family friends as William Styron, Irwin Shaw, and Willie Morris, and would rub elbows socially with the likes of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, and Kurt Vonnnegut.

Two constants defined Kaylie’s privileged and seemingly fairytale-like life—literature and alcohol. She and her father shared a mutual adoration, and he instilled in her a love of literature. She both admired and feared her alcoholic mother and theirs was a tenuous, contentious relationship. When her father passed away, Kaylie was lost and powerless to halt her mother’s further descent into alcoholism—one of the few things mother and daughter shared. Kaylie, too, used drink to dull the pain. She also immersed herself in her father’s novels, and determined that she too, would write.

Lies My Mother Never Told Me is the mesmerizing and luminously told story of one woman’s struggle to overcome addiction and flourish despite the looming shadow of a famous father and an emotionally abusive and damaged mother. Intensely emotional, brutally honest, it is a tale of personal evolution, family secrets, and a determined woman’s journey, fraught with the pain of discovery and loss, to find her own voice.