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to Eternity, The Thin Red Line) she chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 annually to an unpublished first novel.