NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2025 BY: The New Yorker • The New York Public Library • The Times Literary Supplement (London) 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. Praise for The End is the Beginning “[A] poetic family memoir . . . unveiling a nuanced portrait of a woman shaped by love and loss.” — The New York Times Book Review “What gives the new book its resonance . . . is not the extremity of catastrophe but the ordinariness of Iris’s passage through the tempo of her times—the stirrings of feminism, the whole-foods dawning of the hippie era—which Bialosky chronicles in flashes with an Annie Ernaux-like lens, locating the individual in the general.” —Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker “By telling her mother’s story in reverse, Bialosky offers a thought-provoking way of looking at how memory declines with dementia, exploring the common phenomenon that the earlier years often appear clearer and the idea that even an ordinary life has great literary potential.” —The New York Public Library (A Best Book of 2025) “In this new book, Bialosky’s authorship has never been more powerfully poignant. . . . The End Is the Beginning offers an energizing, well-paced meditation on loss and living.” — Los Angeles Review of Books “In The End is the Beginning , Bialosky portrays her mother's years and stumbles with tenderness and candor. . . Bialosky—a novelist, memoirist and poet—skillfully uses reverse chronology to build it. . . The trick of memoir is to wed the specifics of a life with universal themes. One such theme is the longing to arrest, even reverse, a loved one's decline and death . . . writing that is this fine is an act of emotional preservation." — Wall Street Journal “Eloquent and moving . . . [a] fully rendered and loving portrait.” —Hilma Wolitzer, East Hampton Star “The gorgeously detailed narrative will resonate with every daughter and mother who reads it.” — Newsday “Bialosky delivers a nuanced portrait of her mother, Iris, who died in 2020. . . . [she] approaches the heavy subject matter with a light touch and casually profound prose. Readers will be moved.” — Publisher's Weekly (starred review) “The End Is the Beginning . . . opens with the death of Bialosky's mother, Iris, but proceeds backward to lovingly spool through the course of an "extraordinary life" marked by tragedies. . . . The reverse chronology is a stroke of genius as tender attention brings a loved one back to life.” — Shelf Awareness “Exquisitely written . . . [Bialosky] expresses deeply poignant feelings and insights . . . spellbinding.” — Booklist “[A] daughter’s poignant effort to see the whole of [her mother’s] life . . . For most of us, it takes a lifetime to see our parents as full and complex people; for Bialosky, it takes just over 200 pages.” — Oprah Daily “[A]n affecting family history of loss and grief.” — Kirkus Reviews “Jill Bialosky is a wonderfully talented novelist, poet, and longtime Executive Editor and Vice President of W. W. Norton & Company. Her exquisite prose is evident on every page of The End is the Beginning . . . we can rejoice alongside her in this hard-won accomplishment.” — New York Journal of Books “This richly sympathetic memoir deserves—and will surely find—a noted position in the history of mother-daughter books through the tender-hearted work of Jill Bialosky.” —Vivian Gornick, critically acclaimed author of Fierce Attachments “[A] stunning memoir . . . [and] a breathtaking recollection.” —Book Reporter “Reading The End Is the Beginning is like opening a set of nesting dolls. With each lyrical, finely wr