Rebuilding a Relationship

Yvonne Conza interviews Jill Bialosky about her new book, “The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother.”

By Yvonne ConzaMay 7, 2025

• Poetry

• Memoir & Essay

THE END IS THE BEGINNING: A Personal History of My Mother (2025) is Jill Bialosky’s threefold examination of a parent (mother), a mother-daughter bond, and the embracement of self-freedom. She is an executive editor and vice president of W. W. Norton & Company and has edited writers such as Nick Flynn, Nicole Krauss, Mary Roach, and Adrienne Rich. While her acclaimed poetry, essays, and books include the New York Times best-selling memoir History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life (2011), with this new book, Bialosky’s authorship has never been more powerfully poignant. She also addresses caregiving, Alzheimer’s, and end-of-life financial issues as she introduces unexpected, but welcome, humor. For those who have lost parents, The End Is the Beginning offers an energizing, well-paced meditation on loss and living.

Iris Yvonne Bialosky’s life and death are recounted to readers in reverse order—from burial to birth. Iris dies in an assisted care facility at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. This reflective vivid structure, rooted in storytelling elements and predicated on 1950s societal norms when women were schooled to be beautiful before becoming wives and mothers, preserves her mother’s dignity, which was truncated by Alzheimer’s. A widow, then a divorcée, during a generational time of unstoppable social change and reinvention, Iris finds herself on the wrong side of history while raising four girls.

Bialosky and I each lost siblings to suicide, in different ways grew up fatherless, and had mothers who were very young when their own mothers died. With ease, we discussed on Zoom the preservation of dignity, the consequences associated with coming of age, girlhood, and more.

¤

YVONNE CONZA: The book’s reverse-order structure—was that something you knew from the start?

JILL BIALOSKY: For a long time, even before she passed away, I wanted to tell my mother’s story. Then when she passed away during the COVID-19 lockdown, which was so difficult, that’s when it occurred to me that by writing the story backwards, it would be as if she were slowly coming back to life decade by decade. It took me a while to get the movement of when to withhold information and when to be able to give out little markers. Once I figured that out, I was just writing it piece by piece. Afterward, I had to do a lot of rewriting to ensure that the reader would keep track of everything.

It’s really well done. I’ve known you for years, but now for the first time—on these pages—you are fully seen.

I’m frightened of that part of it, but also what the hell. What does it matter anymore what we reveal about ourselves and what we don’t? The beauty of writing is the discovery that to do it right, you must make that choice. At a certain point, I recognized that the book is very much about me too.

It’s a gorgeous balance, but I wouldn’t call this a memoir.

I’m glad you said that because I haven’t wanted to call it a memoir. From being an editor, I know you have to have a BISAC code that classifies a book by its topic. That way people can search for it online. It’s a deeply restorative personal history of my mother.

It shares similar shelf space with Lydia Millet’s We Loved It All: A Memory of Life (2024), which has elements that are strongly rooted in memoir, but like your work, it stands more adjacent to the genre. I like a line Peter Borland, your editor, included with the galley. “It’s interesting to think about our parents having lives that once didn’t include us.”

Peter and I did wonder about it. In bookstores, it’s likely to be organized under Biography or Memoir, and I suppose it does have aspects of both, but I think of it as an inventive work of prose, especially in its backward story structure.

What are your hopes for this book?

One of the most important things about writing the book was the recognition that my mother grew up in an era when women were schooled to be beautiful, then to become wives and mothers. She was raised in a modest Jewish family, and when she lost her husband, she found herself on the wrong side of history. Being so young still, with three girls, barely toddlers to take care of, she couldn’t really forge a career. People forget just how difficult it was for this generation of women. Because of that, I knew, and so did my sisters, that from a young age we were on our own. We inherit so much from generation to generation. It also feels important to establish the awareness that as women, daughters, and mothers, we have gone far, but we haven't really gone that far.

Finally, the mother-daughter bond is powerful. I didn’t realize just how powerful it was until I wrote this book. It allowed me to comprehend how tied I was to my mother in ways that crippled me, but also made me blossom. That influential bond is what I’m hoping readers will connect with, whether they’ve had negative relationships with their mothers or positive ones. I think even men can appreciate that.

Does being vulnerable impact a book launch?

When History of a Suicide came out, I felt vulnerable. Surprisingly, despite the dark topic, it went on to become a critically acclaimed bestseller. With the new book, from the people who have read and talked to me about it, I’m finding out that there’s a deep interest in the Jewish aspects of my mother’s coming of age in a precarious time. She was raised during the Great Depression as Hitler rose to power in Germany. Lillian and Eugene Greenbaum, her grandparents, were of Hungarian descent and settled in an area of Cleveland known for its Hungarian Jewish community. The area was once nicknamed Little Hungary. This engagement others are having with the material, which I didn’t expect, feels supportive.

Is that support something that balances feeling vulnerable?

Regardless of feeling vulnerable, I’m strengthened by telling her story. My mother was an ordinary person, in that she wasn’t a public figure in any way, but her life was extraordinary in a personal way.

After your father died, doctors prescribed Valium, tranquilizers, and amphetamines to your mother. Did those prescriptions bring on her depression?

She couldn’t move forward without those medications. That’s how I saw it. At that time, I do think that doctors were prescribing a lot of amphetamines to women. I think too, as Betty Friedan says in The Feminine Mystique (1963), that these women who were brought up to be caretakers, homemakers, and sex objects to their husbands, many of them were terribly unhappy. I think that’s why these doctors were giving them medication.

You reference your mother having a Marilyn Monroe–Jayne Mansfield sexiness. Having a bombshell body is a different way of being in the world. Whether you want it to be or not—it’s put upon you. Then there’s becoming a widow and raising all girls, getting married, having another daughter, then getting a divorce. She was trying to hold on to so much in a society that didn’t provide for her.

Her scrapbook from high school was just unbelievable to me. She had so many dates and was known for her figure and her beauty. Growing up with that being the one thing that people see you as was both a blessing and a curse. Especially as she aged, because we know that it’s much more challenging for women when they age and they’re looking to meet somebody. That’s just the reality that my mother felt. Whether it was true or not, that’s how she saw it, that at a particular point, men only want younger women.

Then times shifted. Changed. The women’s movement began and women were beginning to fight back and want more. She still had these girls to take care of and very little resources. That probably resulted in her having a lack of confidence in herself. For me, I recognized the need for an education very early on. It’s what I wanted.

That brings me to midway through the book, when you’re in college and the mother-daughter complexity is not only illuminated but also made relatable to many readers: “For the first time, I’m oddly free, as if I can stuff my past in the closet and become a new person in this place where no one knows a single thing about me. I’m no longer one of poor Iris’s girls.”

I didn’t expect to put that in the book. It was a surprising recognition that came to me in the writing. That vulnerable part of myself, where at that point in my life, I suddenly understood that my coming of age and how I was raised had consequences for me.

Leaving home to get an education meant pushing away from your mother’s generation. Talk about your aspiration to live.

I’m not sure it was completely conscious at the time. From a very young age, I knew that I was on my own. There was no financial support system for me or my sisters. The only way was to get an education, right? That’s what my mother lacked. As much as I loved and admired my mother, I also often fought against wanting to be like her. Yet there were aspects of her that I did want to be like, because she was a loving, warm, and caring person. But I never wanted to be dependent on anyone because I saw that was tragic for her.

The word “dignity” comes up a great deal. What does it mean to you?

It’s very important to feel dignity in my life and to see it in others. How do you maintain your dignity when so much around you is so unsteady? Dignity is a way of projecting self-love and a belief system. I did have this Jewish education until I was 13, where I went to synagogue and we had Hebrew school, then we went to the synagogue. And at the end of the morning, the rabbi would give his sermon, and I really believed in it all … the Ten Commandments, how one should be, and living a moral life. And a moral life is also about having dignity for yourself.

I wanted to always preserve, for instance, my sister who died from suicide, her dignity. I wanted to preserve my mother’s dignity as she was going through this terrible disease. I suppose I want to think of myself as a person of great dignity in striving to lead a good life. A life of meaning. I get a lot of satisfaction from the work that I do as an editor and bringing authors’ books into the world. So yes, dignity. It’s all tied in there with leading a dignified life. I suppose my mother instilled that in me. She believed in being a good person, and not everyone grows up with that.

Dignity is threaded throughout the book … from the beginning to the end. In every chapter, we see how that dance with dignity is both challenged and upheld. If you do a word count on dignity, I bet it’s a high one.

Oh, boy.

There’s even humorous dignity when you and your sisters get busted for bringing pizza into your mother’s kosher assisted living facility. Readers can discover for themselves your other amusing adventures. But I do want to ask about a reflective question in the book: “What will the world look like without my mother to care for?” Where are you now with that?

Relieved and blessed because my mother had so much love in her. Taking care of her was so painful and it just invaded my life in ways I still don’t understand. The guilt was very challenging for me. I still feel guilt that I could have done more. I miss my mom very much.

Can we talk about the deck at the start of the book being rebuilt at your Long Island home. It felt like a larger metaphor. Was it?

Yes. Tearing it down and then building a new one does connect to writing the book. When my mother died, we were tearing down the old deck, and as the scraps were being put into a big dumpster, I felt myself breaking. It was hard to lose my mother during this time when I couldn’t be there with her because of COVID. In writing the book, it was like I had to rebuild my relationship with my mother—at least that is how I saw it.

But the rebuilding, which in the book worked in reverse, gave both you and your mother back your girlhoods.

I love that. I’m not sure I was aware of that, but that makes a lot of sense to me.