The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother
“hard-won accomplishment.”
Jill Bialosky is a wonderfully talented novelist, poet, and longtime Executive Editor and Vice President of W. W. Norton & Company. Her exquisite her prose is evident on every page of The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother.
But Bialosky is also an uncertain, reluctant, and often ambivalent memoirist. She has spent most of the last 67 years constructing a life that allowed her to leave behind the messy debris of her childhood. She has endured many losses. She lost two babies shortly after their birth, and it was years before she was finally able to nestle her beloved son Lucas in her arms. Her younger stepsister Kim took her own life when she was just 21. Shockingly, her father died young from an unexpected heart attack when Bialosky was only two, leaving her mother with three girls to raise by herself.
During the last several years Bialosky has navigated the treacherous decline of her mother from Alzheimer’s disease until her death in 2020. She recalls thinking shortly after her mother’s death that she needed to write about her. She writes mournfully, “I realized there is so much I don’t know about my mother, so much that I never understood. She was monumental in my life. It was as if there was a cord from her heart to mine that was never severed. Who was she before she had me? What had she sacrificed to raise us? Born in 1933, what was it like to come of age in the forties and fifties, when so little was expected of women save to be wives and mothers?”
But we readers sense there is more here than she is telling us. We get the distinct feeling Bialosky wants to heal herself from hurts that have festered for decades. Bialosky left home early finding solace and great success in college and afterward when she fell in love with writing, poetry, and publishing.
She made it all the way from her childhood home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, to Manhattan where she set out to live an independent life, buoyed by the encouragement she received from professors who noticed her talent and drive. She met and fell in love with a handsome attorney with a heart of gold, they married, and they both settled into busy exciting professional lives. When their son Lucas arrived, it seemed she had everything. But memories of her childhood haunted her along with feelings of unrest. She carried guilt and shame for things she didn’t fully understand, and perhaps thought of journeying backward in time would help her see things more clearly.
She explains to us how she approached this project: “This is not a biography of my mother. It is one daughter’s subjective rendering informed by observing and bearing witness. I have struggled with whether to tell this story, but find myself unable to restrain, such is my belief that my mother’s experience of profound loss, heartbreak, and endurance will be inspiring to others.”
But we find her flowery sentiments stiff and artificially tinged, as if she still is struggling to garner the courage to say what she must. She confesses during the last few years “There are things I want to say to my mother. I want to tell her I’m sorry that her last years have been unpleasant and compromised. I want her to forgive me for not living closer to her in the last years of her slow dying. I want assurance from her that she knows I have done my best. For her to give me a sign she is ready. This is magical thinking because now she can’t articulate her thought into full sentences. Only a word or two, a nod.”
Again, we suspect Bialosky is not being entirely forthright with us. It’s not that she is trying to be deceptive but seems to feel constrained by years of repressing her own uncomfortable thoughts. We can almost hear her struggling to decide how much she is willing to share with us. We can imagine her thinking about what she wants to leave unsaid. Perhaps most importantly, we see her take baby steps toward facing her own anger about all that has transpired and the suffering she has endured.
But as the narrative continues, Bialosky starts to open up and share with us what it was like to grow up in her childhood home including the bleak ugliness that was often a part of it. Her mother seemed unable to recover from the untimely death of her husband and was often unable to care properly for Bialosky and her two sisters. Her mother fell in and out of lingering depressions and the family was in a continual state of financial distress. Her mother remained almost exclusively focused on finding a new husband as if only that could heal her heart.
Bialosky, already a precocious thinker, resented her mother’s dependency on men, and was often embarrassed by the sort of men she would bring home after dates. Bialosky often stops herself midstream when she is on a tear almost as if she is afraid to continue. She reminds us “All of us hold our private worlds close. I have not attempted to capture the whole of my mother’s life, having chosen to write about pivotal moments. I may have gotten things wrong, including some of the family history I pieced together.” But the cat is out of the bag. Bialosky knows she must continue.
Readers may find themselves riveted by Bialosky’s ability to shift gears midway through her work as she mines her memory for darker truths. She herself is tired of repeating banal observations about her mother’s physical beauty, or her sense of style, or even her artfulness in decorating their home with elaborate flower arrangements. She knows there were endless nights of vulnerability when she and her sisters collaborated on how to keep their mother afloat. Often, they would clean the house before their mother got up and bring her a warm breakfast hoping to keep her together for another day. They were young, and she was all they had.
Bialosky seems to have trouble expressing anger and resentment even though she can no longer avoid it. She didn’t, and still doesn’t, truly understand her mother’s passivity and often wished her mother would get her act together and take her proper place at the helm of their family home. She wonders why she never thought to become a teacher or a librarian or find any stream of revenue that would last longer than a few months at a time. When her mother remarried, there was a temporary euphoria that heightened when her stepsister Kim arrived, but all was destroyed when her second husband left her suddenly and showed no interest in remaining in touch with his daughter Kim. Her mother was adrift again, and so were she and her sisters. Kim seemed shellshocked that her father seemed to have just disappeared without a trace.
Bialosky erects guard rails for herself as she plunges deeper into her family’s history. She refers to her mother not as Mom or Mama but by her first name, Iris, and we understand this is one of the ways she protects herself from feelings that might overwhelm her.
At times, she throws caution to the wind and tells us how disgusted she felt as a teenage girl when her mother came home some nights after drinking too much with her date in tow and they would sit in the living room groping at one oblivious to the little girls watching them. She responds to the agony of this piercing memory writing, “Does she not get that her lack of boundaries is inappropriate? Get a hotel, I think. I’m twisted. Part of me resents my mother, and the other part feels sorry for her. I understand she needs the attention from a man, but I wish she had more strength, more of a constitution, and didn’t rely so much on finding a new husband to make her happy. I also know somewhere in my young mind that she’s caught on the wrong side of history.”
There are other reflections long repressed that seem to surface out of nowhere. She recalls many an evening when her mother would snap at something she or one of her sisters said and then start explosively crying and apologizing a minute later. It was a lot for such young girls to bear.
She speaks of her sisters often, but they remain unknowable, and we aren’t certain if she is protecting their privacy, or her attention is consumed by the desire to understand her mother. The same could be said of her obliging husband and wonderful son. They never come alive for us other than as the backdrop to her increasingly successful life. It’s clear she is trying to focus on who her mother was, and how her mother’s behavior affected her in all other realms. We understand that her feelings for her mother are complicated in many important ways, and Bialosky sometimes seems to waver in her efforts to enter previously forbidden zones.
There is something about Bialosky that seems to indicate she struggles at times navigating the intimacies of close relationships. She wants to be a good sister, a loving daughter, and a warm mother and wife but seems to feel drained by all the obligations such relationships impose. She concedes she still feels the most steady and balanced while working, and recalls after reading the works of “Virginia Woolf, Colette, Anais Nin, and Marguerite Duras” as a young woman, she felt forever changed by their teachings. She knew that she, too, was a woman who bristled at the expectations that accompanied family life. She resented the onus placed upon women despite their other inclinations. She vowed early to always cherish her professional life understanding it was something no one could take away from her. It was bullet-proof.
Ultimately, it’s the uncertainty of Bialosky’s narrative voice and its repetitive unreliability that holds us in sway. We see her initially trying to canonize her mother into some sort of saintly figure whose outward beauty possesses the power to erase her mother’s more significant deficiencies. As Bialosky struggles against her own inclination to closet the truth from her readers and herself, we watch her fight back and force herself to become more forthcoming. Midway through the book, the narrator of her first pages has faded from view and another fierier and more authentic Bialosky has taken her place. This Bialosky is the one we have been waiting for.
There are no easy resolutions to Bialosky’s fraught memories of her early life, and she is too skilled and smart a writer to try to put forth any for us to consider. Instead, she allows us, and herself to see all the turbulence and latent grief that remains entrenched in anyone who has lived with an unreliable parent. And we can rejoice alongside her in this hard-won accomplishment.