The end is the beginning

The end is the beginning A personal history of my mother

Jill Bialosky

Book - 2025

"Jill Bialosky, the poet behind the "tender, absorbing, and deeply moving memoir" (Entertainment Weekly) History of a Suicide, returns with a lyrical portrait of her mother's life, told in reverse order from burial to birth. When Iris Yvonne Bialosky died in an assisted care facility on March 29, 2020, it unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter, Jill Bialosky. Grief, of course, but also guilt, confusion, and doubt, all of which were compounded by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic which made it impossible for Jill to be with her mother as she was dying and to attend her mother's funeral. Now, with a poet's eye for detail and a novelist's flair for storytelling, Jill presents a profoundly moving e...legy unlike any other. Starting with her mother's end and the physical/cognitive decline that led her to a care home, The End Is the Beginning explores Iris's battle with depression, the tragedy of a daughter's suicide, a failed second marriage, the death of her beloved first husband only five years into their young marriage, her joyful teenage years, and the trauma of losing her own mother at just eight years old. Compounding her challenges of raising four daughters without a livelihood or partner, Iris's life coincided with an age of unstoppable social change and reinvention, when the roles of wife and mother she was raised to inhabit ceased to be the guarantors of stability and happiness. As we see Iris become younger and younger, we learn how we are all the sum of our experiences. Iris becomes a multi-dimensional, fascinating woman. We come to understand her difficulties and shortcomings, her neediness and her generosity, her pride and her despair. The End Is the Beginning is not just a family memoir, it is a brave and compassionate celebration of a woman's life and death and a window into a daughter's inextricable bond to her mother"--

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BIOGRAPHY/Bialosky, Iris Yvonne
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Location Call Number   Status
2nd Floor BIOGRAPHY/Bialosky, Iris Yvonne Checked In
Subjects
Bialosky, Iris Yvonne, > 1933-2020.
Bialosky, Jill > Family.
Mothers and daughters.
Grief.
grief.
Biographies.
Autobiographies.
Genres
Biographies
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Washington Square Press 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
Jill Bialosky (author)
Edition
First Washington Square Press hardcover edition
Physical Description
261 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781451677928
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

Poet and novelist Bialosky (The Deceptions, 2022) honors her mother, Iris, by telling her story in reverse, as indicated by the title of this exquisitely written portrait. We meet Iris in the grip of dementia in her final days, when COVID-19 strands Bialosky on Long Island, unable to be with her mother in Cleveland. Looking back, she tracks the relentless stages of Alzheimer's, including her mother's move from the family home she'd lived in for five decades to assisted living. Earlier, Iris' three older daughters, very close in age, left to launch their own lives, while her youngest daughter, the child of a short-lived second marriage, dies by suicide. Then back to the shocking death of Bialosky's father when he was only 30, leaving Iris, 25, with three children in diapers. The further back the story goes, the deeper "the legacy of mental pain." Bialosky captures gorgeously resonant, illuminating details and expresses deeply poignant and keen feelings and insights. The unspooling of time creates a spellbinding and suspenseful narrative, and Iris shines in all her beauty and love, sorrow and courage.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Poet, novelist, and Norton executive editor Bialosky (Asylum) delivers a nuanced portrait of her mother, Iris, who died in 2020. Telling the story in reverse, Bialosky opens with Iris's death from Alzheimer's while in hospice in Ohio, then highlights the challenges of caring for an aging parent long-distance from New York City: "The painful absence and loneliness at the core of her life frightens me," Bialosky writes. "Without purpose, what makes a life?" As Bialosky depicts Iris's life before Alzheimer's, that question gathers poignancy--especially in the context of her first husband's premature death in 1959 and her youngest daughter's suicide in 1990. Elsewhere, Bialosky chronicles Iris's happy adolescence, struggles and successes as a single parent, and dating life after her second marriage ended in divorce. Along the way, Bialosky also wrestles with her guilt over leaving the Midwest for New York ("She sees herself as the bad one, the one who got away... maybe another kind of daughter would have moved back to Cleveland to look after her mother because... her mother needed looking after"). Bialosky approaches the heavy subject matter with a light touch and casually profound prose. Readers will be moved. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (May)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A daughter bears witness to her mother's pain. Memoirist, poet, and novelist Bialosky unfurls her mother's life from the time of her death, in 2020, to her birth in 1933, creating an affecting family history of loss and grief. Iris Bialosky was living in a skilled nursing home residence when she died, suffering from dementia. Because she had been diagnosed with depression and anxiety throughout her life, it took years to finally identify her final affliction. For the author and her sisters, the diagnosis was not surprising. "In one way or another," she reflected at the time, "it feels as if we sisters have tried to hold our mother together for most of our lives." Their father died of a heart attack at the age of 30, when the girls were barely toddlers, leaving Iris a single parent, overwhelmed with responsibility for her children and consumed with grief. As the author grew up, she was well aware that her home life was far different from that of her friends. Her mother "never asks to see my grades. She doesn't iron or wash my clothes. She rarely has food in the fridge. I am afraid to ask her for anything. All of us are." Iris' husband's death was not the only cause of her recurring depression, the "dark tentacles" that invaded her. Iris' mother had died when she was 9, leaving her father in constant mourning and her longing for her mother's love. As a young widow, Iris hoped to remarry; her short-lived joy from a second marriage--and a fourth daughter--ended in a bitter divorce and, later, that daughter's death by suicide. Unspooling the events of her mother's life, Bialosky reveals, has helped her to understand both the parent who at times seemed so remote and her own place in her family's fraught history. A sensitive chronicle of sadness. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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