The End Is the Beginning

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2025 BY: The New Yorker • The New York Public Library• The Times Literary Supplement (London)

“With tenderness and candor, [a] nuanced and final farewell…Writing that is this fine is an act of emotional preservation.” —TheWall Street Journal

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.

Iris Yvonne Bialosky’s death in March 2020 unleashed a torrent of emotions in her daughter Jill—grief, guilt, confusion, doubt. Now, with her poet’s eye for detail and novelist’s flair for storytelling, Jill Bialosky presents a profoundly moving elegy of her mother’s life—telling Iris’s story in reverse order. Starting with her mother’s end and the physical/cognitive decline that led her to a care home, Bialosky traces Iris through her battle with depression, the tragedy of her youngest daughter’s suicide, her strained and short second marriage, the death of her beloved first husband, which left her, at twenty-five years old, to care for three daughters under the age of three. We experience her joyful first marriage and busy teenage years, as well as the trauma of losing her own mother at just eight years old. As Iris grows younger and younger, she becomes a multidimensional woman and we come to understand her difficulties and triumphs, her neediness and her generosity, her pride and her despair.

The End Is the Beginning is a brave and compassionate celebration of a woman’s life and a window into a daughter’s inextricable bond to her mother.