The story of Lies My Mother Never Told Me, the new memoir from Kaylie Jones, begins 115 miles southeast of Champaign-Urbana, in Robinson, Illinois. Robinson is the hometown of Jones’ father, James Jones, the celebrated author of such WWII-themed novels as From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line.
Kaylie Jones will be returning to her East Central Illinois ancestral roots this week, first stopping Wednesday at the Illini Union Bookstore for a reading and signing event at 4 p.m. Then, she heads to Charleston for the James Jones Literary Society’s symposium “Memories of War” at Eastern Illinois University on Friday and Saturday, November 6 and 7. She’ll be joined by award-winning author Tim O’Brien for an informal meeting with students at 2 p.m. on Friday, and then she’ll be reading from her new book again on Saturday morning at 9:15 a.m. You can see the full symposium schedule here (PDF).
Lies My Mother Never Told Me deals with Jones’ tumultuous relationship with her mother, who struggled with years of alcoholism before her passing in 2006. It’s Jones’ first memoir after having written several novels. I spoke to her on the phone on Sunday, as she was preparing to head to the Heartland.
Smile Politely: You live outside of New York City, then?
Kaylie Jones: No, I live in the city. I live in Manhattan.
Smile Politely: You’ve lived there since the ’80s?
Kaylie Jones: I’ve lived in Manhattan, in New York City, since college, with some forays out, but mostly here since 1981. I moved here after college to go to grad school at Columbia.
Smile Politely: Have you been out on book tours for this book already?
Kaylie Jones: I’ve been on the road pretty much since Labor Day weekend. I’ve been coming home — I have a daughter — I’ve been coming home as much as I can, so I haven’t stayed out on the road all of this time. I’ve been away, I come back, and I go away again. I’ve been doing a lot of events, a lot of fundraisers, some readings and some other events. I’m coming your way this week, and I’ll be in Illinois for five or six days.
Smile Politely: Do you enjoy going out on book tours?
Kaylie Jones: I enjoy it. I love meeting new people, I love meeting writers and people who are interested in books. The library events, they’re really fun because they’re people who love books and love to talk to writers. That part of it has been really, really fun. It’s kind of hard for me to be in hotels and be away from my family, my daughter and my husband. I find that a little bit hard. But overall, the experience of being at book festivals, readings, and especially fundraisers for libraries or literacy, I’ve really enjoyed. I’ve really enjoyed just being in places I’ve never been. I was in Nashville for a couple days, in San Diego, in La Jolla, I was in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. I’ve really, really had a fun time.
Smile Politely: That’s quite a lot of ground you’ve been covering.
Kaylie Jones: Yeah, and I’m going to go to Florida three times in January and February and March. And that’s going to be fun, because it’s also book festivals and library events, which are just fun to do. So I’m not finished yet, I still have quite a lot of traveling to do, but overall it’s been a really good experience. And Illinois is different, because my dad is from Robinson, Illinois, and I have really good friends in Champaign-Urbana, and I stay with them, they have a guest house. I stay in their guest house, and they have kids that are my daughter’s age, and friends with my daughter, so I don’t feel so much like I’m alone when I stay with them. It should be pretty easy. And the James Jones Literary Society event, which will be at Eastern Illinois University in Charleston on Friday and Saturday, that’s a lot of old friends getting together because the society’s been going since 1992, and I know a lot of those people. That’s going to be a lot of fun, I’m looking forward to that, because I’m going to get to meet Tim O’Brien, the Vietnam veteran author, he’s coming to give the lecture and a reading.
Smile Politely: Cool, that sounds like a lot of fun. He’s one of my favorite authors.
Kaylie Jones: Yeah, he’s going to give a reading from his new book, but he’s also going to give a talk on how James Jones influenced the next generation of Vietnam writers, so that’s something that I’m really looking forward to.
Smile Politely: As you’re going around on tours, have you met a lot of people who want to share their story of a difficult upbringing or a complicated relationship with their mother?
Kaylie Jones: Yeah, that’s interesting that you mention that, because a lot of people who come who’ve read the book, they want to ask me questions and tell me about their experience. The thing that people are really asking is, “Am I crazy? Am I absolutely crazy?” because nobody seems to think that this is abnormal except for me. And usually in a family, that’s how it is. There’s one person who’s the scapegoat for everything. Those people who have really difficult relationships with their parent or whoever feel really isolated from the norm, from the regular way the world works. I think it’s very empowering to be able to say that out loud to somebody else.
Smile Politely: I think that would be very normalizing for someone like that to be able to say to somebody else.
Kaylie Jones: Yeah, that’s been my experience. I haven’t met with the kind of resistance that I expected. I thought people would be more angry and upset than they have been. Certainly, there are people who are angry and upset, but they’re mainly people who wouldn’t confront me. They probably say things to people, but I don’t hear that. The people who come to me and want to talk to me are people who know that what I’m saying is true, who had experiences like that with their own family, or knew my mother and knew that situation and that what I’m saying is absolutely true.
Smile Politely: Had you started on this book before your mother passed away (in 2006)?
Kaylie Jones: No, I don’t think I could have even… I addressed alcoholism and denial and other stuff in my last couple of novels, definitely, and in writing those, I felt like kind of a fraud, like I wasn’t really addressing those issues, I was dealing with that through fiction. And that’s completely OK, but once my mother died and my godmother sort of ironically said to me, you can use these, they’ll make a great novel someday. And I looked at her and I said, “Are you crazy? I don’t want to write about this.” A novel? Oh my God, who’d want to read a novel like this? And then another writer friend of mine, Susan Cheever, who’s the writer John Cheever’s daughter, who’s a memoirist — she’s wrote two amazing novels, but she’s an amazing memoirist— said, “What are you doing? This is a memoir!” And I was absolutely horrified by the thought. I thought, “I don’t want to write about this.” Just the word memoir was so impactful, so empowering and scary. Really scary. And so I thought that’s what it had to be. When I started working on it, it all came out.
Smile Politely: How long was the process of writing the book once you got going?
Kaylie Jones: It was pretty quick, really, for me. It took me about 13 months to write the first draft, and it was less chronologically organized. It was more associative. I went back and cut some stuff that didn’t need to be there, and made it more chronological. Then the editor came along and cut more out of it, probably more for financial reasons than anything else, but probably because it needed to be cut. Then it really took its shape, and it took a few more months after that. But the first draft took about 13 months, which is very fast for me.
Smile Politely: Would you like to talk a little about your teaching while you’re on the road so much? Are you a full-time teacher, and how do you balance that with your book touring schedule?
Kaylie Jones: Yeah, it’s been a little rough balancing the teaching. I teach in two places: I teach in a low-residency MFA program, in which you only go to the university twice a year – you go for a week in January and a week in June. And the residency is a completely packed schedule from morning till night for a week. You get credit for that week, the students do, and after that you go home and work from an online, virtual university — the website. So the rest of the term is through the internet. That’s actually worked out a lot better than I thought. I’m a real old-fashioned person and I was thinking, “This is never going to work. I don’t want to do this.” But I actually like it very much, I think it’s a really successful program, and I really like those kids. Because it’s on the internet, you can create a virtual discussion, and you can have workshops online, almost in real time, which works really well. So that’s Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, and my other job in at Southampton College, and they actually have a campus in New York now, and that’s really good for me, so I can just go there and teach rather than having to go out to Long Island. The thing is, though, that I’ve had to reschedule a lot of classes. That’s been kind of difficult, because it’s spread the semester out quite a bit, but it’s been a really good class. It’s a memoir class, and I’m kind of new to the memoir as essay, memoir as short piece to submit to magazines and online venues. And it’s been really fun, because I’ve started doing that myself, trying to send pieces out for publication while I’m working on my book tour. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve been trying to teach this class in the way that, you know, fiction and non-fiction, in making them good writing are not all that different. In terms of technically what you need to be a good writer, I’ve found.
Smile Politely: Could you expand on that a little bit?
Kaylie Jones: Let’s talk about memoir and fiction, for example. And creative non-fiction. When you’re writing a personal essay or a character sketch, or a piece of a memoir, between the two, it doesn’t have to be in the first person, but you’d still do all the things that you would do in fiction, in other words: switching point of views, using detail and imagery, not judging and projecting for the reader what’s coming up, not using judgmental adjectives and adverbs. All the things that I teach in the fiction class can be applied in the same vein to memoir writing. Like journalism-journalism, like interviews like what you’re doing, I wouldn’t have any idea how to do that.
Smile Politely: Well, that makes two of us.