Kaylie Jones, daughter of James Jones, author of WWII classic From Here to Eternity, reveals at The Daily Beast that her father’s original manuscript included a gay sex storyline deemed too risque for 1951. The original book included: “One character, Maggio [who] makes extra bucks by hanging out with older, rich gay men who live in Honolulu, who pay good money for his company,” and a “soldier, Bloom, realizes he enjoys sex with men, and is so terrified and ashamed of being gay and of being called on it, that he commits suicide.” Jones goes on to argue that the issues of acceptance and censorship her father struggled against continue to this day.

Kaylie Jones is an award-winning novelist and screenplay writer. She is the acclaimed author of A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (which was made into the Merchant Ivory film starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey and won the New York Public Library Young Adult Fiction Award), Celeste Ascending, As Soon as it Rains, Quite the Other Way, Speak Now, and Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir (William Morrow). The daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line) she chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 annually to an unpublished first novel. Her screenplay Anor of Aquatain, written with her husband, Kevin Heisler, won the gold medal at the Houston Film Festival, while her original screenplay Limbo, won a New York Women In Film Screenwriting Award. A Writer in Residence in the New York City public schools through Teachers & Writers Collaborative and a creative writing teacher at the MFA Program in Writing at Long Island University’s Southampton campus, she is a sought after keynote speaker at writers’ conferences and festivals, libraries, and universities.

HCSB’s latest speaker, Kaylie Jones discusses her (not-so) charmed childhood, her family’s struggle with alcoholism, and rebounding with martial arts, as revealed in her new memoir Lies My Mother Never Told Me (William Morrow), on shelves 8/25.

Kaylie Jones  is an award-winning novelist and screenplay writer. She is the acclaimed author of A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (which was made into the Merchant Ivory film starring Kris Kristofferson and Barbara Hershey and won the New York Public Library Young Adult Fiction Award), Celeste Ascending, As Soon as it Rains, Quite the Other Way, and Speak Now. The daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line) she chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 annually to an unpublished first novel.