Kaylie Jones Lies My Mother Never Told Me

Kaylie Jones’s new memoir , “Lies My Mother Never Told Me,” comes out this month.

The book is a brilliant gem. I read it twice, it was so filled with humor, insight and courage.

There are so many amazing stories that one immediately wants to tell someone else.

Her mother’s exploits will top most every “You won’t believe what my mother did” story. Once, Kaylie’s mother smashed her car through a truck that blocked her into a parking spot. She totaled her car, but drove on. Jones also shares intimate moments with many of the writers she knew, from her father, James Jones, to Kurt Vonnegut and Ron Kovic, author of “Born on the Fourth of July.”

Every storyteller’s child struggles to put together their own version. But James Jones gave his daughter the wisdom to see beyond anyone’s truth, to see both sides of a story. The encounters she chronicles can be divided into two kinds: someone fights to be right, or someone gives unconditionally. Those who fight to be right always end up losing more.

The title, “Lies My Mother Never Told Me” captures the way stories people tell sometime cover darker truths. And one can lie with silence.

The book shows that the only way to speak the truth is to speak with love. As James Baldwin says, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

Ms. Jones found the courage to face her own secrets and deal with her fears, to work to become stronger. It struck me, in reading this, that it takes so much courage to make peace, and we must start with our own battles—lost or won. As the daughter of a writer who sought to chronicle the story of the common soldiers of WWII, she has taken his lessons and worked to speak out for peace.

The story of Kaylie’s well-lived life, her father, whom she lost as a child, and her troubled, brilliant mother reminds me of these lines from Roethke’s notebook, “Straw for the Fire.”

I live in a country

The land of the free—

Did I eat my mother

Or did she eat me?

Or was the devouring done mutually?

I cherish her image

When I look in the glass,

I was a true son:

Of the middle class.

But now shapes and shadows

Throng the stair and the hall

And I lie thinking

Nothing at all, nothing at all.

Outside, the slow winds

Move through the long grass,

Where my father keeps moaning

Alas, alas.

We Can Change the World

I heard that these lines are inscribed on a tombstone in Westminster Abbey:

“When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world. I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family. Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.” ~Unknown monk, 1100 AD

Melville on God

Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure. Oh, busy weaver! unseen weaver!—pause!—one word!—whither flows the fabric? what palace may it deck? 

wherefore all these ceaseless toilings? Speak, weaver!—stay thy hand!—but one single word with thee! Nay—the shuttle flies—the figures float from forth the loom; the fresher-rushing carpet for ever slides away. The weaver-god, he weaves; and by that weaving is he deafened, that he hears no mortal voice; and by that humming, we, too, who look on the loom are deafened; and only when we escape it shall we hear the thousand voices that speak through it.

Earth Day

                                                                   Happy Earth Day!

I say this in a whisper,

for the time has not yet come—

only with long, hard labor

may obscure heaven be won.

 

Our sky is temporary,

and never forget this fact:

heaven’s a house you carry

forever on your back.

 

Osip Mandelstam—translated by Holly Woodward

A Single Shoot

            Manet painted one small asparagus stem on a miniature canvas and sent it to a collector who had paid two hundred francs more than the painter had asked for his picture of a bunch of the stems. 

If you look closely, this one shoot, pale, plump, lying across the canvas like a nude, holds every color of the rainbow: purple, blue, green, yellow, orange and rose.  All his life Manet wanted to be accepted and couldn’t understand why such an apparently simple aim proved beyond his grasp.  But this tentative stem that appears after the first spring rains, stretches, a frail rainbow of hope over the edge of a marble (cutting?) slab, reaches out to us like the innocent, hopeful finger of Michelangelo’s Adam.

Manet's Painting of the Folies Bergeres

Manet at the Folies-Bergère

You realize as you look at the serving girl’s face that you have just asked for something she doesn’t sell—at least to you—though it is on display.  Intoxication.  Everything glitters as if glazed: the fruits, the liquor, her eyes.  That marble slab that looks like the lid of a sarcophagus—is she holding it up or down?  It seems that she is pressing down with all the weariness she can muster.  Nevertheless you will never get over it.  Beyond her you see the ugly face of a man in need and realized with a shock it’s your own reflection.  Under his lips are two blood-red spots; his raised fist grips a dark stick.  Now you understand the expression on her face.  And that all these people must also see it.  This is a theater, and through some terrible mix-up, one of those extravagant rearrangements the dream director is never too tired to manage, the theater has been completely rearranged so you are at the center.  The acrobat’s death-defying feats in the far left corner are a lame attempt to distract the audience from its own self-denying death.

Bernard Madoff and a current bestseller

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” was written by the Swedish writer, Stieg Larsson, who died shortly after completing the book in 2004. It is a thriller with a powerful financial criminal and the crisis he brings to the financial markets. The resemblance to our current crisis, and Bernard Madoff’s role is eerie.  Near the book's close, Larsson speaks of the stock crash:
The Stockholm Stock exchange found itself in freefall and a handful of financial yuppies were threatening to throw themselves out of windows.
And the hero says:
“The idea that Sweden’s economy is headed for a crash is nonsense,” Bloomkvist said.
“We are experiencing the largest single drop in the history of the Swedish stock exchange—and you think that’s nonsense?”
“You have to distinguish between two things—the Swedish economy and the Swedish stock market. The Swedish economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day . . .. That’s the Swedish economy and it’s just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago. . . . The Swedish Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions. It doesn’t have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy . . .. It only means that a bunch of heavy speculators are now moving their shareholdings from Swedish companies . . . systematically and perhaps deliberately damaging the Swedish economy in order to satisfy profit interests. For at least twenty years, many financial reporters have refrained from scrutinizing [the greatest perpetrator of fraud]. On the contrary, they have actually helped to build up his prestige by publishing brainless, idolatrous portraits. If they had been doing their work properly, we would not find ourselves in this situation today.”