Jill Bialosky, THE END IS THE BEGINNING: A Personal History of My Mother
Totally Booked with Zibby
Zibby Owens
4.4 • 602 Ratings
🗓️ 27 May 2025
⏱️ 26 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), Zibby chats with poet and New York Times bestselling author Jill Bialosky about her lyrical, profoundly moving new book, THE END IS THE BEGINNING. Told in reverse chronology, it traces the remarkable life of her mother, from her death during COVID back to her Depression-era childhood, exploring memory, identity, loss, and resilience. Jill opens up about losing her mother to Alzheimer’s, the pain of her sister’s suicide, the impact of an abusive stepfather, and the inherited strength passed through generations of women. With raw honesty, she shares how writing became a refuge—and a way to bring her mother back to life on the page.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Zibby Owens. Welcome to Totally Booked, where I get to talk to my favorite authors and hopefully yours too. |
| 0:10.0 | Today we have Jill Biloski, who has already been on my podcast and is back this time with The End is the Beginning, a Personal History of My Mother. And here is a little bit you should know about |
| 0:24.3 | Jill. Jill Bailoski is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, most recently Asylum. |
| 0:34.0 | Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Atlantic, among others. |
| 0:39.6 | She is the author of several novels, including the Deceptions and two other works of nonfiction, |
| 0:46.0 | history of a suicide, and poetry will save your life. |
| 0:50.4 | In 2015, Jill was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to field of poetry. |
| 0:59.0 | She lives in New York City. Find out more. |
| 1:01.8 | Jill Byloskey.com. |
| 1:04.5 | Welcome, Jill. |
| 1:06.6 | Thank you, Zibby. Thanks so much for having me. |
| 1:10.0 | It's my pleasure. Your book, oh my gosh, I like |
| 1:13.5 | kept tearing up reading this. It is so poignant and I don't want to scare people away by saying |
| 1:19.9 | it's so sad because it's so beautiful and the way we love the way we love things that we've lost |
| 1:25.9 | is just so moving. So talk a little bit about the book |
| 1:30.0 | and what it's about. And then I want to read a short section of it if it's okay. Great. Thank you. |
| 1:35.2 | I'd love to. So my book is called The End is the Beginning and a Personal History of My Mother. |
| 1:43.0 | And what I wanted to do in this book is tell my mother's story from the end of her life to the beginning. |
| 1:51.5 | And what happened that really encouraged me to pursue this book was that I lost my mother during the first month of COVID. I was in New York and my mother |
| 2:06.0 | was in Cleveland. And of course, if you remember, there were restrictions at that time where you |
| 2:12.1 | had to quarantine for 14 days before you could leave the state even. So I was not able to be by my mother's side when she passed away |
| 2:23.3 | and she had been in a care home where she was suffered for 10 years, |
... |
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