INTERVIEW: Jill Bialosky, Author of The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother

Interviewed by Leslie A. Lindsay

It’s March in the Midwest as I read The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother (Washington Square Press/Atria; May 2024). If anyone knows anything about March in the Midwest, or maybe March in general, they are likely aware that it is anything but stable. March is a transition month. Think: Covid-19. Think: tornadoes. Think: mud. Yesterday, it was eighty-degrees, today it snowed. Tomorrow will be windy but sunny.

That’s The End is the Beginning, by Jill Bialosky, a gorgeous, unsentimental, clear-eyed memoir about Bialosky’s mother’s devolve into depression and dementia, and her eventual death.

Told with a poet’s precision for language, and a novelist’s eye for storytelling, Bialosky takes a slightly unconventional approach to this memoir, beginning with the end, quite literally. It might be what is called a ‘frame story,’ in that we get a glimpse of Bialosky and her mother, Iris, in ‘present day,’ end with Bialosky and her mother in ‘present day,’ yet the middle is composed almost entirely of Iris’s life unfolding in reverse order, almost like a nature film in that we see the melting of the snow, the planting of a seed, and eventually the blooming of a flower. Iris grows younger, which I found to be the most tender and glorious way to eulogize a parent.

To say The End is the Beginning is a story of mothers and daughters, absolutely true. To say it is about grief and loss, also true. To identify it as a memoir about family dynamics, inherited trauma, and reinvention would be an understatement. We follow Jill and her mother Iris, through some tumultuous decades, unstoppable change, all while exploring the roles of wife, mother, daughter, and even grandmother, highlighting that we are all a sum of our experiences.

This is a story about change and reinvention, about holding on and letting go. As Bialosky writes, “The end is my mother’s beginning, too, and my beginning. And in the end is the beginning of who we are. The end and the beginning are in each of us.”

Please join me in conversation with Jill Bialosky.

Leslie Lindsay: It’s such a delight and honor to chat with you, Jill. You are author of several novels, prose, including the bestselling memoir, History of a Suicide, and numerous volumes of poetry, most recently Asylum, which I loved. I’d like to start with the title of the book, The End is the Beginning. I believe this is an adaptation of the epigraph you chose, which is a line from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Park IV Little Gidding. Am I on the right track? Are you the type of writer who needs to know ahead of time the title of your work, or do you allow that to coalesce as you work?

Jill Bialosky: Leslie, thank you for your generous and beautiful comments about The End is the Beginning. I can’t remember exactly when the title came to me. All I know is that it felt organic and surprising all at once.  I love Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and when I was working on an early draft of this book, I was at a short residency at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and was reading and re-reading the quartets and the refrain, “the end is the beginning” circles throughout Little Gidding. The poem was in my head, my consciousness, and then, of course it made all the sense in the world as the title for this book especially when I challenged myself to write my mother’s story in reverse chronology. The idea is that we are all both our ends and our beginnings.

LL: There’s a lot of imagery that comes to mind with the title, and also the cover. I’m looking at it now; it’s a gorgeous blue iris set on a verdant background, which of course, Iris, being your mother’s namesake, and green, which I see as renewal. If we dig a little deeper, we can conjure things like earth and seed, roots, rain, and even sunshine. We need all these elements to grow, but also, to die. I see this book as very cyclical. The best stories don’t really end, they keep living, not always on the page, but in one’s mind, in their heart. Can you speak into that, please?

JB: When I was working on Asylum I was thinking about what survives and perishes and the natural world became threaded into my inquiry. In writing The End is the Beginning I was thinking about regeneration, and about how the dead live inside us after they’ve gone, and I’m glad the imagery came into the writing. I wanted to bring my mother alive again in this book and to see what more I might discover about her, and about me. Writing has always been a way of thinking for me. Weather is a powerful force in our lives. Our moods shift when the sun is out, or when it’s cold and rainy. In fact, I edited an anthology about writers on weather called Gigantic Cinema: Writers on Weather. And too, as a poet, my eye is very much trained to metaphor.

LL: I’m always curious about structure, which I think we discussed a bit in the first question, but I’d like to go a little deeper. Did you set out to tell a reverse chronology of your mother’s life, or did it come forth organically? Was there a ‘muddy middle’ that pushed you over that threshold?

JB: The form came organically, and I also welcomed the challenge. As I attempted to tell this story from reverse chronology I read a screenplay for Harold Pinter’s Betrayal, also told in reverse chronology from the end of an affair to the beginning. I so admire that play and it was inspiring to take the challenge. I had this idea that since my mother suffered from Alzheimer’s and I slowly watched part of her disappear, wouldn’t it be amazing if the reader could gradually see her come alive again. It was a challenge, especially knowing what not to give away, or how much to give away, and after many drafts I felt confident that it was the right way to tell this story.

LL: I want to turn now to memory and time, which, heady topics, I know. You mention early on that this is not a biography of Iris, but that it is made up of memories, impressions, stories. In some instances, you consulted your own intuition, plus photos, research, and your own imaginings. It’s not exactly speculative, but is it? And also, you write this about time and memory, “Time exists in the present and deeply meaningful events of the past, including relationships ensconced in long term memory that can last a lifetime.” Much of this, I realize, is about dementia, but I think it can be applied to just about everything. Can you talk more about that, please?

JB: The first part of the book was easier to write because I could rely on memory, as I remembered my mother through the various pivotal periods of her life. Chapters 11-13 required a different skill set because I wasn’t alive during those periods when my mother met my father, her high school and junior high school years, and then her early years of childhood. I was lucky that my mother kept scrapbooks and photo albums that I could draw from, and I remembered stories she told me and stories my relatives who knew my father and mother told me.

Magic happened in writing those chapters. I felt as if I was reliving those early years of my mother through the storytelling. And of course, I knew my mother’s father, my grandfather, and my great aunts, who were a big part of my mother’s life and mine. I can’t explain it further. Are those chapters speculative? Is the entire book speculative? In the sense that we can’t fully know another individual I suppose in some ways this is true.

Thank you for quoting the line about how time exists in the present and deeply meaningful events of the past. This idea gave me comfort in thinking about my mother and what her life was like in the last years when she was ill with dementia. But we all draw on our memories for sustenance. I know that my mother drew heavily on her memories of my father and truly believed they would be united in the afterlife.

LL: Iris came of age in such a tumultuous time. She was born in 1933, the height of the Great Depression. She lost her mother at a young age, was a Jewish girl assimilating in Cleveland, Ohio, and so much more. She grew up seeing housewives of the 1940s and 1950s and that was her model for adulthood: go to school, meet a nice Mensch, and have babies. Let’s talk more about this idea of being the ‘perfect housewife,’ and how that affected Iris’s life.

JB: My mother grew up in an era where women were expected to be wives and mothers. It is what was instilled in her by her community, family, and friends. When her husband died suddenly at the age of thirty from a heart attack, she was left with three babies to care for and she had no livelihood or higher education except for one quarter of college. Her dream of being a young mother and wife crumbled in that instant and she was only twenty-five years old. Her family encouraged her to eventually try and marry again and her second marriage was a disaster.

I believe if my mother came of age in a different era and had a fuller identity, for instance more education or a skillset behind her before she married, she would have chosen a different route. She had many talents, emotional intelligence, and an eye for beauty and style. I always felt she could have been an artist or a social worker. Not having an education or a solid skill set left her with a lack of confidence. I don’t think my mother wanted to be the “perfect housewife” but I do think she hoped to be financially cared for and to have a partner to raise her children with. And perhaps if my father was still alive, as she raised her children, she would have had more of an opportunity and financial security to find herself outside of her identity as mother. As I say in my book, she was born on the wrong side of history.

LL: The End is the Beginning tackles some really emotionally challenging material. Dementia, ageing parents, suicide, infant loss, spousal death, downsizing and leaving a childhood home. It’s not a story of rainbows and puppies, that’s for sure. Can you talk a little about writerly self-care while working on such emotionally challenging material?

JB: Yes, there is emotionally challenging material in this book. As a writer and a reader, I’m searching for truth, honesty, ways of making sense of difficult experiences. When you stack up the losses it does feel overwhelming, but those are losses I have endured, and I continue to hold those I have lost in my thoughts and consciousness.

There were times when I questioned the legitimacy of writing this book. I have written about parts of these challenges as Emily Dickinson would say by telling it slant in poetry and in my first novel, House Under Snow, and certainly in my memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. This book was different. I lost my mother during COVID and couldn’t be with her because of restrictions for travel and quarantine. That broke my heart. I think I realized then that my mother’s story was worth telling and revealing through the very small prism of her daughter. We need to be reminded of the challenges faced by women of that era where the patriarch loomed—it may, for all we know, happen again, as restrictions of freedom begin to narrow.

The hard part for me is not the writing, it’s the persistence!

LL: Lastly, on my desk at home, I have a stack of books, my to-be-read/recently read pile. It creates a sort of cento, a poem made up of lines from other poems. Here they are:

The Folded Clock

Artful Truths

American Ending

The Antidote

Reading the Waves

Always There, Always Gone

The End is the Beginning

I don’t know…this goes back to the month of March, I suppose. It summons change and the concept of time. Maybe it’s a bit of a roadmap or crystal ball. Maybe it’s just a stack of books.

JB: I love the idea of a cento poem formed from a stack of book titles. Why not? All of these titles recall time. Time has always been a mystery to me. How we live in so many layers of time past and time present and time future paraphrasing Mr. Eliot.

Eliot and Thomas Mann kept me company as I was writing this book, Eliot’s The Wasteland and The Four Quartets and Thomas Mann’s, The Magic Mountain, all preoccupied with time. And I suppose The End is the Beginning is also about time and memory and how they shape us.