Unveiling Secrets and Loss: Jill Bialosky’s Intimate Journey Through Grief and Memory
Jill Bialosky: Leslie, thank you for your generous and beautiful comments about The End is the Beginning. I can’t remember exactly when the title came to me. All I know is that it felt organic and surprising all at once. I love Eliot’s “Four Quartets” and when I was working on an early draft of this book, I was at a short residency at the T. S. Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and was reading and re-reading the quartets and the refrain, “the end is the beginning” circles throughout Little Gidding. The poem was in my head, my consciousness, and then, of course it made all the sense in the world as the title for this book especially when I challenged myself to write my mother’s story in reverse chronology. The idea is that we are all both our ends and our beginnings.
