The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother

Poet, novelist, and Norton executive editor Bialosky (Asylum) delivers a nuanced portrait of her mother, Iris, who died in 2020. Telling the story in reverse, Bialosky opens with Iris’s death from Alzheimer’s while in hospice in Ohio, then highlights the challenges of caring for an aging parent long-distance from New York City: “The painful absence and loneliness at the core of her life frightens me,” Bialosky writes. “Without purpose, what makes a life?” As Bialosky depicts Iris’s life before Alzheimer’s, that question gathers poignancy—especially in the context of her first husband’s premature death in 1959 and her youngest daughter’s suicide in 1990. Elsewhere, Bialosky chronicles Iris’s happy adolescence, struggles and successes as a single parent, and dating life after her second marriage ended in divorce. Along the way, Bialosky also wrestles with her guilt over leaving the Midwest for New York (“She sees herself as the bad one, the one who got away... maybe another kind of daughter would have moved back to Cleveland to look after her mother because... her mother needed looking after”). Bialosky approaches the heavy subject matter with a light touch and casually profound prose. Readers will be moved. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (May)