Women Talking: Mothering Our Mothers
an interview with author Jill Bialosky
So often Mother’s Day is centered around the mother who is actively mothering, the one who is in the trenches of the day in, day out raising of a child. But today, we’re going to reflect about our relationship with our own mothers.
When I had the opportunity to read an early copy of Jill Bialosky’s The End Is the Beginning, I said yes given the phenomenal endorsements that already lined the press release:
, Amy Bloom, Vivian Gornick, Claire Messud. Bialosky is also someone I aspire to be: a published writer who works on the inside. In other words, Bialosky’s day job is as an executive editor at Norton. And this is her twelfth book.The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother is, at its heart, a book about grief. Bialosky loses her mother during the early days of the COVID pandemic. But she had been losing her for years. Her mother struggled with cognitive decline during the final decades of her life, and Bialosky and her sisters worked together to come up with a care plan that kept their mother safe and tended to even as they continued their adult lives raising kids, and building careers, miles away from their hometown.
One of the most fascinating creative choices Bialosky makes is she writes the book from the day of her mother’s death and then goes back in time. It is reverse chronology. So we see the end, and then, as we turn the final pages, we see the beginning.
What we witness is, due to the difficult life her mother led, Bialosky had been caring for her mother for years, feeling responsible for her mother’s well-being given she became a widow with three daughters just five years into her young marriage. Iris, her mother, was twenty five years old. Forever after that tragedy, her mother struggled to make ends meet in a world that predicated a woman’s survival on the financial protection of a man. And her daughters rallied around her, around each other, trying to make sure everyone was okay. As in all family systems, there was a complicated network of support, caretaking, and codependence.
When their youngest sister, a child their mother had during her second marriage, commits suicide at age 21, their mother’s fragile state devolves even further. This loss is just one of many she faced. And you witness Bialosky grappling with the question: How does one stay standing when pummeled by loss?
This is a tender book. The chapter where Bialosky must write her own father’s death, you feel her reticence to put the unspeakable onto the page. But she does. In honor of her mother, in honor of her love for her, in honor of her legacy.
A testament to the lengths we go to show our love, and the complicated ties between mothers and daughters, Bialosky and I engaged over some of these themes via email. Her book is now on-sale and is available here.
CD: I think something that happens to women when we become mothers, or at least as we approach middle age, is we start to assess our own relationship with our mothers. Something about the act of mothering allows us to recognize, and come to terms with, how we were mothered. Was this something you experienced? How did the act of becoming a mother lead you to want to write this book?
JB: Yes, certainly. I have only one living child, a son, and when I was writing my book about my mother, especially when I came to imagining the years after she lost my father at twenty-five and was left alone to take care of three young babies on her own, I truly couldn’t imagine how she did it. I was lucky to raise my son with my husband, who shared equally in all the duties. As a mother, I began to understand more about the physical caretaking required, but also about the emotional caretaking a mother takes on, not just when her children are little, but throughout the life course. My empathy for my mother grew. Being a mother has impacted all my writing, but especially this new book. It is such a deep bond.
The choice to go backwards in chronology is an interesting one. As a reader, we begin to see that, as you progress back, you’ve been taking care of your mom for a lifetime, not just in the last few decades as her mental state declined. That given that she became a widow at 25, when you were just two years old, you’ve always understood her precarity and felt like she needed you to help keep her stable. How was it, in later years, to have this dynamic externally validated and how did it allow you to see in a new way that this dynamic had been present all along?
I’m glad that as a reader the structure of the book made you see the care-taking aspect that began as a child. Of course, as a child, I wasn’t aware that I emotionally felt that I needed to take care of my mother. It was my world, what I was born into and it was natural and instinctual. As I came of age, it became more challenging because I needed to also take care of myself and I fought against it to forge my own life even as emotionally I was still there for my mother. In her later years, when my sisters and I had to care for our mother externally, as you say, it felt huge to me. I know that so many of us reach this stage in life when we must care for a parent and watch a parent suffer. I hope my book will validate that experience, its intensity, and its beauty, because it is love that binds us.
In the opening letter in your galley, written by Peter Borland, it says that you’ve been working on this book for a decade. But of course your mother just died in the early days of the pandemic. Did you always know you would write about your mother? Did you know that this writing would only come to light after her death? How did writing this book both allow you to work through your grief and also continue work you'd begun years before?
I wanted to write a book about my mother after I finished writing History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. I knew that my mother had led a life filled with incredible periods of loss and joy, and suffered probably more than most, and I was also interested in understanding more about the bond we shared and the impact it had on my own life. Writing is a way of thinking deeply for me and I knew that it was important terrain. But I found I couldn’t do it when my mother was still alive. I didn’t have enough distance. I was still living in the day-to-day. Writing is a way of reflecting back. That is one reason I am happy I landed on the title The End is the Beginning because it was my way of moving backward, and it brought me great joy in the writing process to bring my mother alive again in this way and to further understand her outside the parameters of being my mother.
You had to do a good bit of imagining in the later sections of the book as you envision your mother’s life before you. She kept detailed scrapbooks during this time and thus you were able to craft together a picture of dates and dances and how her peers conceptualized her at school. I recently came across a kind of daily journal/diary my own grandmother kept during the year 1977. She would have been a similar age as your mother. In it, she records short entries of her days. Sometimes it's about all the chores she got done. Other times it is an account of her grown children visiting. She often noted whether it was a good “mail” day, aka did she receive any letters. (She noted the day Elvis died!) I think about this time, for women, in particular, when they didn’t have much to show for their days and wonder if record keeping was a way to fight against their non-existence, to put something on paper to say: here I am. Here’s what I did. What do you think compelled your mother to keep such detailed notes on her life? And is this an argument to keep people from destroying their journals and personal papers upon their death as it allows insight into the inner workings of their lives (which of course is often tied to the impulse to destroy?)? What would it have been like to write this book without those scrapbooks?
This is a great question. I like what you say about record keeping as a way to fight against non-existence. That is profound. I felt great sympathy for my mother, who came of age in an era where the choices for women were to marry and have children, and then the tide turned on her, and she was too young to lose what she had thought would be her future. I’m grateful that she kept her meticulous and beautiful scrapbook. It made me see how happy she was then, and I saw that she was something of an artist. It takes patience to keep a record of one’s life, and I was never able to do it. I would start a diary or a journal, and then a week later, I would be done with it. I do think this scrapbook my mother made was also a way of keeping track. Later in life, she also began to create photo albums, which was a way of keeping track. A different way of writing. It would have been more challenging to write the book without the scrapbooks. It was where I saw such beautiful possibilities for a future and a joy in socializing and engagement with her community of schoolmates and friends, as well as sparks of her own ambitions.
Your mother lost her husband during a time when women needed men in a way they no longer do today. She didn’t complete college and despite stints in real estate, she was not set up to be a primary earner. How did this impact her choices in her love life? How do you think it shaped your opinion on how/why/if you wanted to marry or the kind of union you wanted?
Yes, that is true. My mother was not set up to be a primary earner and I don’t know how she could have afforded an education after my father died, given that she had three children to support and care for. This impacted her life, and especially what I saw as her desperate desire to find a partner. In writing this book, I realized that my mother could not find what she had with my father with another man. It was a deep love and connection, and he was caring and adoring. She kept looking but never found it again. She loved my father to the end of her days and hoped to be reunited with him. I came to realize how sustaining a short lived love could be. I learned through my mother’s life how important it is to be independent and to be able to rely on oneself to be an earner, because we don’t know what life will throw at us. I never wanted to have to rely on someone else to support me. We go through a bit of trial and error, don’t we, in finding the right person we want to share a life with. I knew when I met my husband that he had the qualities my mother cherished in my father. It was kismet. It was what my father and mother unconsciously passed down to me.
I, too, spent a good part of my career working “on the inside” as an editor in a publishing house. How do you balance the roles of writing while working a full time job as an editor? Do you take time off to write each book or do you incorporate your creative work outside of traditional working hours?
I incorporate my creative work outside of traditional working hours. I’m an early morning person and it is the best time for me to write. It’s when I’m not distracted by the events of the day and I like to preserve that time before I begin my work as an editor. I tunnel in on the weekends, and once I have a draft, if I can I like to go away for a brief stint to a writer’s retreat to have that time to dig in and think. It’s a process that I’ve been doing for many years now and it has its own strange rhythms. I’m grateful for my work as an editor. There’s something electric that happens when you fall in love with a manuscript and can see it to the end of publication. It never gets old. Writing is a solitary practice, and editing is a collaboration with a team of colleagues and with an author, and for me, the marriage of these two practices fuel each other in ways impossible to fully describe.
That you, Jill, for your time answering these questions. Did you know Jill was the editor for The Leaving Season by
? If you know someone who might be touched by this interview, or be moved by this book, please forward it and spread the word!What are you doing this Sunday to celebrate yourself or the one who birthed you?
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What a thoughtful, moving interview. I hadn't had this book on my radar but I do now - thank you!