Poet, Novelist, Essayist, Editor
Jill Bialosky's newest work of prose is The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother. Her most recent volume of poetry Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, four critically acclaimed novels, most recently, The Deceptions, a finalist for the Gotham Book Award, and a two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and New York Times bestselling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, O Magazine, The Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, Paris Review and Best American Poetry among others. She co-edited with Helen Schulman the anthology, Wanting a Child. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company. In 2014 she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry.
“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
Order The End Is the Beginning
The End Is the Beginning
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.
Praise for The End Is the Beginning
“Jill Bialosky is a wonderfully talented novelist, poet, and longtime Executive Editor and Vice President of W. W. Norton & Company. Her exquisite prose is evident on every page of The End is the Beginning… we can rejoice alongside her in this hard-won accomplishment.”
“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.”
— Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
“[A] daughter’s poignant effort to see the whole of [her mother’s] life… For most of us, it takes a lifetime to see our parents as full and complex people; for Bialosky, it takes just over 200 pages.”
— Oprah Daily
“[A]n affecting family history of loss and grief.”
— Kirkus Reviews
Jill Bialosky is a rara avis find in the world of literature and publishing. An Executive Editor and Vice President at W.W. Norton & Company, an acclaimed poet, novelist, and memoirist, Jill brings to everything she does an astute, incisive attention to nuance, a probing and fearless intelligence, a reverence for mystery. As an editor and a writer, Jill embodies what the romantic poet John Keats called negative capability.
Jill’s new book, The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother, simply leveled me. It is one of the most incandescent, courageous, and truly *helpful* books I have ever read…tender, rigorous, exquisitely beautiful…”
— Priscilla Gillman, Lit Hub
“Exquisitely written… [Bialosky] expresses deeply poignant feelings and insights… spellbinding.”
— Booklist
“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
“Be a lamp or a lifeboat or a ladder, Rumi says. This compassionate, lyrical and clear-eyed memoir is all three. A gift to anyone with a family.”
— Amy Bloom, New York Times bestselling author of In Love
“Like Annie Ernaux, Bialosky is scrupulous and unsentimental in her account; this rigor is, itself, a testament of great love. The End is The Beginning is an unforgettable and profoundly moving book.”
— Claire Messud, critically acclaimed author of This Strange Eventful History
“How do you endure the unendurable? When Jill Bialosky’s mother finally succumbed to Alzheimer’s at the height of the pandemic, she couldn’t even be there to bear witness. This book is an atonement: a brave and eloquent assessment of a life battered by loss and ennobled by resilience.”
— Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, most recently of Horse
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