Jill Bialosky Explores Her Mother's Life in 'The End is The Beginning'

In The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother, poet, novelist, and editor, Jill Bialosky, writes a moving family memoir centered around her mother, Iris Yvonne Bialosky. Her book starts in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic first begins and Iris has just passed away after succumbing to Alzheimer’s while in hospice care. From there, Bialosky continues to tell her mother’s story in reverse order from death to her childhood. Along the way, readers learn about Iris’ two marriages, the sudden death of her first husband, her divorce from her second husband, and the tragic suicide of her youngest daughter. In regards to why Bialosky decided to write about her mother’s life, she remarked, “I’ve always wanted to write about my mother… I wanted to, sort of, preserve a record of history through this narrative of an extraordinary ordinary woman and the family that she made under extreme circumstances [and] to capture what it was like for a woman of my mother’s generation who is born in 1933 and to capture this era of expectation for a woman… her adult life really does begin with the story of her falling in love with my father… and she married at age 21 and they were a very happy couple and they quickly… had 3 babies… and then when my mother was 25 and my father was 30, he died unexpectedly and of course after that tragedy, what my mother thought her future would be was completely erased and she had to reimagine a new life with no livelihood, and part of the reason I wanted to write this book was really also to show, I think that motherhood is undervalued in our society… I think it is important as a historical record to remember what happened during that era and how that era influences future generations of women.”

For Bialosky, the key takeaway she learned from her mother’s life was the importance of maintaining her own independence. She saw how instantly Iris’s world changed after losing her first husband at such a young age, and how greatly that affected herself and her family. “I think that that really, I saw more so when I was a teenager how difficult that was for my mother and that was something that I never wanted for myself. In other words, it was very important to me to be independent and to have my own livelihood and not to depend on anyone because I grew up with this idea that anything could happen at any minute that could disrupt one’s life, and that was my message from my mother’s life.”