
The End Is the Beginning
A Personal History of My Mother
by Jill Bialosky
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date May 06 2025 | Archive Date May 20 2025
Atria Books | Washington Square Press
Talking about this book? Use #TheEndIstheBeginning #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
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.
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781451677928 |
PRICE | $28.99 (USD) |
PAGES | 272 |
Available on NetGalley
Average rating from 11 members
Readers who liked this book also liked:
Jia Tolentino; Kim Dana Kupperman
Essays & Collections, Nonfiction (Adult)
Tanis Allen, LMSW, ACSW
Health, Mind & Body, Self-Help
Beth Pinsker, CFP®
Business, Leadership, Finance, Parenting & Families, Professional & Technical
Beatriz Victoria Albina
Health, Mind & Body, Nonfiction (Adult), Self-Help