Q&A with Jill Bialosky

 

Photo by Beowulf Sheehan

 

 

Jill Bialosky is the author of the new memoir The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother. Her other books include the poetry collection Asylum. Also an executive editor and vice president at W.W. Norton & Company, she lives in New York City.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The End Is the Beginning?

 

A: I wanted to preserve a period of history through the narrative of an extraordinary woman and the family she made under extreme circumstances, to capture what life was like for a woman of my mother’s milieu.

 

Q: How would you describe the relationship between you and your mother?

 

A: My relationship with my mother was deep. My father died when I was 2 and my mother was my sole parent.

 

I realized, while writing this book, how so much of my being is shaped by my mother, by the early losses she suffered, first losing a mother at the age of 9, then her beloved husband at the age of 25, leaving her to care for three babies under the age of 3 with no livelihood.

 

Our lives were intertwined, and there wasn’t a day that I can remember that I didn’t worry about her well-being. While our mother was our caretaker, my sisters and I also cared for her.

 

Q: Why did you decide to write the book in reverse chronological order, and how was the title chosen?

 

A: As I was working on this book, I was reading T.S. Eliot’s poem “Four Quartets,” and I was struck by the lines in the poem I use as an epigraph in my book: “What we call the beginning is often the end./And to make an end is to make a beginning./ The end is where we start from.”

 

It occurred to me that telling my mother’s story from the end to the beginning would allow the reader to see her slowly coming alive through pivotal periods of her life. I responded to Eliot’s sentiment that for all of us on our journey through life, the beginning is always at the end and the end is the beginning. 

 

Organically, it made the most sense for me to tell the story this way and for the book to land at the beginning when my mother was first born. Writing the book this way kept her alive for me. The title comes directly out of Eliot’s poem and it landed for me in a powerful way as the title for this book.

Q: What impact did it have on you to write this book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: Writing this book, I was able to understand more about my mother’s early years before I was born and the aspects that shaped her. It gave me far more compassion for her than I had realized. 

 

My mother was born in 1933 into a modest Jewish family, an only child, before her mother died giving birth to her brother who survived. My mother’s aunts and grandmother helped raise her and her brother. Her family raised her to marry young and have children.

 

In junior high and high school, she was admired for her beauty, her excellent figure, and her warm personality, and was popular in the dating pool. Those were her happiest years, along with the years she met my father and married him at 21 and began to build a family.

 

Her life changed suddenly when she lost her beloved husband with three young daughters to care for on her own. 

 

As I wrote these sections of the book, I realized how much those early years marked my mother, who was forever searching for a new man to replace my father, because that was what she had been raised to do. And of course, no one matched him. 

 

I hope readers will see how my mother’s life was shaped by the era in which she came of age and how inexplicable losses and historical events can alter and shape a life. I hope readers can see their own challenges, losses, and joys in my mother’s story and experience the shape of a life. 

 

Q: What are you working on now? 

 

A: I’m working on a volume of new and selected poems.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’d like to end with this quote from Vivian Gornick. Her memoir Fierce Attachments was a touchstone for me as I was thinking about writing about my mother.

 

In a piece for Slate (https://www.salon.com/2003/08/12/memoir_writing), she writes: “A memoir is a tale taken from life -- that is, from actual, not imagined, occurrences -- related by a first-person narrator who is undeniably the writer. Beyond these bare requirements, it has the same responsibility as the novel or the short story -- to shape a piece of experience so that it moves from a tale of private interest to one with meaning for the disinterested reader.” 

 

This is finally what I hope The End is the Beginning will be for readers: a finely told and compelling story.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb