‘The End Is the Beginning' Review: Her Mother's Days, Unspooled

Wall Street Journal

5 hours ago

Iris Yvonne Bialosky typified a generation of women taught to value marriage and family—above all, pleasing a husband—over a career or other measures of accomplishment and self-worth. Those traditional mores nourished her at times. But they also handicapped her, especially when unexpected tragedies—a husband's premature death, a daughter's suicide—pushed her promised life off course.
In 'The End Is the Beginning,' Iris's daughter Jill Bialosky portrays her mother's yearnings and stumbles with tenderness and candor. Inspired by Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain' (1924) and T.S. Eliot's 'Four Quartets' (1943), Ms. Bialosky starts her narrative with 86-year-old Iris's death, from Alzheimer's disease, in a memory-care facility. Ms. Bialosky's grief is accentuated by the timing—late March 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic made traveling and attending funerals nearly impossible. Stranded on Long Island, N.Y., Ms. Bialosky witnesses her mother's Jewish burial in Cleveland over FaceTime.
This memoir, moving backward through the past, constitutes a more nuanced and final farewell. Each chapter describes a major event or turning point in Iris's trajectory, as foreshadowed in previous chapters. Instead of squelching suspense, Ms. Bialosky—a novelist, memoirist and poet—skillfully uses reverse chronology to build it.
The most resonant mystery involves the author's untangling of her own feelings about the woman who raised her with love but also negligence. 'My mother could be inscrutable, irrational, impulsive, willful, demanding,' Ms. Bialosky writes. 'She was never ordinary.'