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A Personal History of My Mother
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 elegy 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.
"Bialosky delivers a nuanced portrait of her mother, Iris, who died in 2020... . [she] approaches the heavy subject matter with a light touch and casually profound prose. Readers will be moved." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[A]n affecting family history of loss and grief." —Kirkus Reviews
"Exquisitely written... . [Bialosky] expresses deeply poignant feelings and insights... spellbinding." —Booklist
"In this new book, Bialosky's authorship has never been more powerfully poignant... . The End Is the Beginning offers an energizing, well-paced meditation on loss and living." —Los Angeles Review of Books
"This richly sympathetic memoir deserves—and will surely find—a noted position in the history of mother-daughter books through the tender-hearted work of Jill Bialosky." —Vivian Gornick, critically acclaimed author of Fierce Attachments
"Reading The End Is the Beginning is like opening a set of nesting dolls. With each lyrical, finely wrought chapter, Jill Bialosky takes us back in time, revealing era after era of her mother's life, from her final days to her girlhood. The End Is the Beginning is as smart and inventive as it is deeply moving. What we find at the center of the story, and the life, is love." —Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful
This information about The End Is the Beginning was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Jill Bialosky is the author of four poetry collections: The Players; The End of Desire; Subterranean, a finalist for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Intruder, a finalist for the 2009 Paterson Poetry Prize. She coedited Wanting a Child and has written two novels, House Under Snow and The Life Room. Her poems and essays have been published in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Nation, Redbook, O, The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, The New Republic, Paris Review, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. She lives in New York City.
Author Interview
Link to Jill Bialosky's Website
Name Pronunciation
Jill Bialosky: BI-uh-lah-skee
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