Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones Search AbeBooks. We're sorry; the page you requested could not be found. AbeBooks offers millions of new, used, rare and out-of-print books, as well as cheap textbooks from thousands of booksellers around the world. Shopping on AbeBooks is easy, safe and 100% secure - search for your book, purchase a copy via our secure checkout and the bookseller ships it straight to you. Search thousands of booksellers selling millions of new & used books. New & Used Books. New and used copies of new releases, best sellers and award winners. Save money with our huge selection. Rare & Out of Print Books. From scarce first editions to sought-after signatures, find an array of rare, valuable and highly collectible books. Textbooks. Catch a break with big discounts and fantastic deals on new and used textbooks. Merchant Ivory. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is the story of an American family living in Paris in the mid sixties, told from the point of view of the daughter, Channe. The father, Bill Willis, is a successful expatriate writer (based on Kaylie Jones's father, the writer James Jones), a WWII veteran haunted by his experiences in the Pacific. His wife, Marcella, is an emotional, fun-loving woman. The film opens the day five-year old Benoit, a French orphan, is brought into the family for adoption. Benôit's natural mother, an unmarried French girl who was only fifteen when her child was born, holds up the adoption proceedings out of feelings of guilt and remorse, thus terrifying the Willises with the possibility of Benôit's removal. Jealous, Channe retreats to the protective embraces of her Portuguese nanny Candida, who takes her frustrations out on the small boy. Benôit, who has been moved around from foster home to foster home, keeps his suitcase packed, ready at a moment's notice to be sent back to the orphanage. It is only after much tenderness and reassurance from Bill and Marcella that Benôit relinquishes his suitcase, and asks to have his name changed to Billy. Against the backdrop of their parents' poker games and all-night parties, the children grow up attending a bilingual school where they struggle to be accepted. When necessary, Marcella intervenes at school, defending her children with a fierce loyalty and railing at the form-obsessed French teachers. Still, Billy wants - more than anything else in the world - to be American. Just as Channe reaches puberty, she is befriended by a sensitive and artistic boy names Francis Fortescue. Francis is fatherless, somewhat effeminate, and the son of an expatriate American mother. They become inseparable. Billy thinks Francis is weird, but Channe admires Francis' knowledge of opera, his ability to tell dramatic stories, and his courage in always being frank and up front. As sexual maturity overtakes Channe, the friendship becomes strained, and Francis, who is excluded from the school's teen-age party scene, becomes more and more withdrawn and morose as Channe looks romantically to the other boys. Their friendship collapses just as Bill announces that at the end of the school year, the family will be returning to the U.S. He explains that a congenital heart problem is getting worse, and he wants to be under the care of American doctors. The children's entire world is suddenly and unceremoniously left behind. In Sagaponack, Long Island, on Labor Day weekend, the Willises arrive at their new home, an old farm house in the middle of vast, green potato fields. Bill teaches Channe how to drive, continues the tradition of all-night poker games, and plays down Marcella's fears about his family's history of heart disease. Channe and Billy attend the local high school, fitting in no better than they did in Paris. Channe begins having sex in the backseats of cars, searching for acceptance and attention. Unsure of herself, she shares intimate conversations with her father about boys and girls and sex. Bill tries to guide her way but feels powerless; he is getting worse, and is preoccupied with trying to finish his final novel about WWII. With the leaves falling outside their home and Billy raking the yard furiously, a dying Bill tells Channe that she must read the diary of Billy's pregnant mother, a diary Bill has kept all these years in anticipation of the day when his adopted son would want to know the truth about his origins. Struggling against time to finish his novel, Bill speaks the final chapters into a tape recorder from his hospital bed and passes away. Billy and Channe are brought close by the enormity of their loss. Marcella tries to give Billy his natural mother's diary, but he refuses to take it. He gives it instead to his sister Channe, in an unprecedented act of love and trust, saying he can manage only one mother at a time. In bravely attempting to fill the role of the responsible man of the family, holding everything together, he comes closer to his American father than he had ever dreamed of being. Director’s Comments. Kaylie Jones' novel A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, which had been published in 1990, was given to me by Robert Halmi, Sr. to read soon after the completion of our film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, on which he had been co-producer. He wanted to do something else with us and hoped I would like the new book, which he had optioned. I was at once attracted to it and said yes. What drew me to this material? Like Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, it was, for me, the autobiographical element on many levels. Beyond that, we had so enjoyed ourselves when we worked in Paris on Quartet (1981) and Mr. and Mrs. Bridge (1990), that we wanted to go back to shoot there again. And then, Paris is a city that has drawn me to it all my life, from the age of 22, when I first went there hoping to enroll in cinema courses at the I.D.H.E.C. (the government-run film school). However, the Korean War began and made that impossible. In the 1970's I had been very close to an American family trying to bring up their four children in Paris, where they attended the kind of international, bi-lingual schools seen in this film. That family, like the Willis family of our movie, eventually returned to the United States (partially because of the illness of one of the parents) and the half-assimilated, French-speaking American children took up new lives. Then again, coming from a family myself in which adaptations are not unknown, I was drawn to the story of Benoit - Billy Willis, the French boy adopted in the film. And beyond that, the story of Francis Fortescue interested me greatly: the clever sissy who knew from the first grade that he would take up a "life of art." A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries of course is in many respects autobiographical for Kaylie Jones, the daughter of author James Jones. Like the Willis family of the book, the Jones family -James, Gloria, Kaylie and Jamie -lived in Paris for many years. When, in middle age, Jones began to feel uneasy about living any longer overseas and, like Willis in the film, became fearful his children would turn into "Euro-trash brats," never knowing who or what they were, he packed everybody up and returned to the United States, eventually settling into Sagaponack on Long Island. In my mind, I based the character of Willis as much on a college friend of mine as on the character drawn in Kaylie�s book -his Western speech, his cusswords, his common sense attitude to life. Kris Kristofferson, without having ever met either model, uncannily managed somehow to personify them both. For Francis Fortescue I sometimes drew on myself; it was I, who told my teacher in the 2nd grade that I could not stay in school because I had been invited to an "early dinner party" -a line that I must have picked up from some Hollywood movie about big-city smart life, for certainly there was no such parties in Klamath Falls, Oregon in the 1930�s. Like Francis, both as a small boy and later as a teenager, I lived a life of constant self-dramatization -a fact most people meeting me now might not imagine. Akashic Books. KAYLIE JONES has published seven books, including a memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me , and her most recent novel, The Anger Meridian . Her novel A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries was adapted as a Merchant Ivory film in 1998. Jones has been teaching for more than twenty-five years, and is a faculty member in the Stony Brook Southampton MFA in Creative Writing & Literature program and in Wilkes University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She is the author of Speak Now and the editor of Long Island Noir . Her newest endeavor is her publishing imprint with Akashic Books, Kaylie Jones Books. Author Events. 7/1/21: VIRTUAL EVENT: Deirdre Sinnott, Kaylie Jones – McNally Jackson (New York, NY) Join our Mailing List. A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries. The novel that inspired the Merchant Ivory film is back in print! With a new author’s introduction and a previously unpublished chapter. We're Sorry. Available as an e-book for: What people are saying… “Although we’ve gotten used to second-generation actors equaling or surpassing the accomplishments of their parents, the same hasn’t happened with second-generation novelist. Nonetheless there are a few . . . and added to their small number ought to be Kaylie Jones.” — New York Times. “The daughter of James Jones here offers a discerning, brightly written bildungsroman. She writes with sensitivity and compassion. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal. “Every page is a joy.” — Self Magazine. Description. The inspiration for the Merchant Ivory film starring Kris Kristofferson, Barbara Hershey, and Leelee Sobieski, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries is a rich and poignant family story from the daughter of novelist James Jones. Back in print, this new edition includes an author’s introduction reflecting on the process of developing a screenplay from her novel, as well as a previously unpublished chapter, “Mother’s Day,” that was left out of the original Bantam edition. Based on the author’s early years in Paris with her famous father, A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries chronicles the growth of an extraordinary family. Previously the adored only child, Channe finds her world disrupted by the adoption of a French brother, Benoit. This inspired novel explores the complex, volatile relationship between a brother, a sister, a mother, and a father as they confront their own experiences of orphanhood. Subjects : Literary Fiction, Women’s Studies Tags : James Jones, Kaylie Jones. Book Details. Paperback : 190 pages Published : 10/1/03 IBSN : 9781888451467 e-IBSN : 9781617752254 Genre : Fiction. Author. KAYLIE JONES has published seven books, including a memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me , and her most recent novel, The Anger Meridian . Her novel A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries was adapted as a Merchant Ivory film in 1998. Jones has been teaching for more than twenty-five years, and is a faculty member in the Stony Brook Southampton MFA in Creative Writing & Literature program and in Wilkes University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She is the author of Speak Now and the editor of Long Island Noir . Her newest endeavor is her publishing imprint with Akashic Books, Kaylie Jones Books. ISBN 13: 9780060977559. A complex novel explores the volatile relationship between Channe and her adopted brother as they clash as children and then, after finally uncovering Benoit's mysterious parentage, come to respect each other as adults. Reprint. Movie tie-in. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. 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. From Publishers Weekly : 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"). Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc. A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. You can sense the love of a daughter for her parents in every frame of "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries." It's brought into the foreground only in a couple of scenes, but it courses beneath the whole film, an underground river of gratitude for parents who were difficult and flawed, but prepared their kids for almost anything. The movie is told through the eyes of Channe, a girl whose father is a famous American novelist. In the 1960s, the family lives in Paris, on the Ile St. Louis in the Seine. Bill Willis (Kris Kristofferson) and his wife, Marcella (Barbara Hershey), move in expatriate circles ("We're Euro-trash"), and the kids go to a school where the students come from wildly different backgrounds. At home, dad writes, but doesn't tyrannize the family with the importance of his work, which he treats as a job ("typing is the one thing I learned in high school of any use to me"). There is a younger brother, Billy, who was adopted under quasi-legal circumstances, and a nanny, Candida, who turns down a marriage proposal to stay with the family. All of this is somewhat inspired, I gather, by fact. The movie is based on an autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, whose father, James Jones, was the author of From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line and Whistle. Many of the parallels are obvious: Jones lived in Paris, drank a lot and had heart problems. Other embellishments are no doubt fiction, but what cannot be concealed is that Kaylie was sometimes almost stunned by the way both parents treated her with respect as an individual, instead of patronizing her as a child. The overarching plot line is simple: The children become teenagers, the father's health causes concerns, the family eventually decides to move back home to North Carolina. The film's appeal is in the details. It re-creates a childhood of wonderfully strange friends, eccentric visitors, a Paris that was more home for the children than for the parents and a homecoming that was fraught for them all. The Willises are like a family sailing in a small boat from one comfortable but uncertain port to another. The movie was directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, from a screenplay by their longtime collaborator, the novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. She also knows about living in other people's countries, and indeed many of Ivory's films have been about expatriates and exiles (most recently another American in France, in "Jefferson in Paris"). There is a delight in the way they introduce new characters and weave them into the family's bohemian existence. This is one of their best films. Channe and young Billy are played as teenagers by Leelee Sobieski and Jesse Bradford. We learn some of the circumstances of Billy's adoption, and there is a journal, kept by his mother at the age of 15, which he eventually has to decide whether to read. He has some anger and resentment, which his parents handle tactfully; apart from anything else, the film is useful in the way it deals with the challenge of adoption. Channe, at school, becomes close friends with the irrepressible Francis Fortescue (Anthony Roth Costanzo), who is the kind of one-off original the movie makes us grateful for. He is flamboyant and uninhibited, an opera fan whose clear, high voice has not yet broken, and who exuberantly serenades the night with his favorite arias. We suspect that perhaps he might grow up to discover he is gay, but the friendship takes place at a time when such possibilities are not yet relevant, and Channe and Francis become soul mates, enjoying the kind of art-besotted existence Channe's parents no doubt sought for themselves in Paris. The film opens with a portrait of the Willises on the Paris cocktail party circuit, but North Carolina is a different story, with a big frame house and all the moods and customs of home. The kids hate it. They're called "frogs" at school. Channe responds by starting to drink and becoming promiscuous, and Billy vegetates in front of the TV set. Two of the best scenes involve a talk between father and daughter about girls who are too loose, and another, after Channe and a classmate really do fall in love, where Bill asks them if they're having sex. When he gets his answer, he suggests, sincerely, that they use the girl's bedroom: "They're gonna do it anyway; let them do it right." "A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries" is not a textbook for every family. It is a story about this one. If a parent is remembered by his children only for what he did, then he spent too much time at work. What is better is to be valued for who you really were. If the parallels between this story and the growing up of Kaylie Jones are true ones, then James Jones was not just a good writer but a good man. Roger Ebert. Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.