Kaylie Jones tells quite a story.

She already has several novels under her belt ("A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries," "Celeste Ascending"), and she writes carefully but with brutal honesty in this book, her first memoir.

The daughter of National Book Award-winning author James Jones ("From Here to Eternity"), she tells tales from her parents' marriage, her father's successes, her childhood in Paris and the seeming colony of alcoholics surrounding her.

Just because Jones' life was privileged doesn't mean it wasn't difficult -- and she expertly walks the line between counting her blessings and recognizing the chaos that sometimes surrounded her.

"What I was trying to address, in some sense, was the myth of that perfect, idyllic, City of Lights Paris childhood," Jones said in a YouTube video posted by the memoir's publisher. "There's a darker side to that story, too, which is the whole society was poisoned by alcoholism."

The memoir is eminently relatable, despite Jones' unique and privileged upbringing. An exercise in self discovery, she overcomes years of emotional abuse from her mother and her own alcoholism to create a life of writing, teaching, motherhood and tae kwon do, earning a black belt.

James Jones, an Army veteran whose novels focused on the lives of soldiers at war, was part of the elite literary circle of the mid-20th century and amassed quite a bit of fame.

Her father died when she was 16, and shortly after his death, Kaylie Jones writes, she was on a train, a copy of her father's first published novel, "From Here to Eternity," on the seat beside her.

The conductor stopped to punch her ticket.

" 'Great book,' he said, handing me back my ticket and nodding toward my book on the seat. 'Best book I ever read.' "

Jones, too stunned to respond, didn't tell him her father had written it.

She writes with humility about her legacy as James Jones' daughter. Accepted to Wesleyan University, she writes that she was only accepted to the school "because of who my father was, not because I deserved it."

During her senior year, her father's novel "The Thin Red Line" was removed from the reading list of a literature seminar, presumably because she was in the class.

Her unease continues into graduate school:

"Even if I wrote the absolute best book I could write," she wrote, "my classmates from Columbia and probably everyone else ... would think I'd gotten published because of who I was."

As she struggles with insecurities about her strengths as a writer, Jones identifies her mother, Gloria, as an alcoholic and begins to recognize her own drinking problem.

Jones' descriptions of interactions with her mother waver between complimentary and adoring to hateful and heartbreaking. She writes of her mother's beauty, wit and charm -- in between chapters, she recounts stories her mother would tell in the company of famous guests (Frank Sinatra, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut).

She doesn't paint a pretty picture of Gloria. "If my mother knew that I'd written this book, she would make every effort to completely assassinate me," she says.

The triumph of this memoir is its accessibility. Admirers of James Jones' work will appreciate the intimate look into his literary and family life, and those with no familiarity with the work of James or Kaylie Jones will still find value in a story of a family with as many problems as privileges.