A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (Bantam New Fiction) - Hardcover

Kaylie Jones was born in Paris, France in 1960 and attended French schools until her family returned to the U.S. in 1974. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, her third novel, is loosely based on her experiences growing up in an expatriate, artistic home as the daughter of famed novelist James Jones. She originally began writing this story as her undergraduate honors thesis at Wesleyan University. Jones' first novel, As Soon As It Rains (Doubleday), was published in 1986 when she was working at Poets & Writers, Inc. in the Reading/Workshops Program. There, she fell in love with the poetry of underprivileged children, written in workshops she helped to fund. As a result of this work, she was appointed as a Writer in Residence in the NYC public schools, where she continues to work today. A stay in Jamaica when she was two was interrupted by an evacuation due to the Cuban missile crisis, and this created in her a fascination for all things Russian. Jones began to study Russian as her third language at age eight, and continued to study the language and literature through her undergraduate and graduate years. She spent six weeks at the Pushkin Institute for Russian Studies in Moscow in the summer of 1984, followed by six months in 1987, which resulted in the novel Quite The Other Way (Doubleday, 1989). Jones received an MFA in writing from Columbia University's School of the Arts and taught fiction workshops for several years at The Writer's Voice. She helped to found the MFA Program at Long Island University's Southampton campus, where she still teaches fiction.

A Phi Beta Kappa, Jones loves scuba diving and yoga. She is married to Kevin Heisler and considers their infant daughter, Eyrna, to be her greatest accomplishment. In September of 1998, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries will be released as a Merchant Ivory film starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey. Her new novel will be published by HarperCollins in 1999.

The daughter of James Jones here offers a discerning, brightly written, apparently semiautobiographical bildungsroman. Channe Willis, the daughter of an eminent American novelist and his loving wife, grows up happy and spoiled in Paris. One day, her idyllic bubble is burst when her parents adopt a young French boy her own age, whose foster mother has committed suicide. Jones ( Quite the Other Way ) captures Channe's waspish jealousy of Billy and her protective feelings for him that blossom against her will. A sexually promiscuous loner who is too dependent on her Portuguese nanny, Channe gropes her way through an adolescence whose pain is exacerbated by her father's heart disease and the Willises' return to America when Channe and Billy are 15. Although it explores Billy's sexually repressed birth mother's motives for giving him up for adoption, this novel is, above all, an elegy to a father-daughter bond that transcends death. Channe's father is almost too good to be true: he celebrates with Channe her first menstrual period, lets her high school boyfriend sleep with her under the Willis roof, and turns Channe on to literature ("My father told me about the souls of books, how they came out of the writer whole, like babies with their own separate souls").
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