Unveiling Secrets and Loss: Jill Bialosky’s Intimate Journey Through Grief and Memory
That’s The End is the Beginning, by Jill Bialosky, a gorgeous, unsentimental, clear-eyed memoir about Bialosky’s mother’s devolve into depression and dementia, and her eventual death.
Told with a poet’s precision for language, and a novelist’s eye for storytelling, Bialosky takes a slightly unconventional approach to this memoir, beginning with the end, quite literally. It might be what is called a ‘frame story,’ in that we get a glimpse of Bialosky and her mother, Iris, in ‘present day,’ end with Bialosky and her mother in ‘present day,’ yet the middle is composed almost entirely of Iris’s life unfolding in reverse order, almost like a nature film in that we see the melting of the snow, the planting of a seed, and eventually the blooming of a flower. Iris grows younger, which I found to be the most tender and glorious way to eulogize a parent.
