Welcome back. This is Lily Houston Smith. I'm the producer of So Your Parents Are Old.

Before we get into today's episode, I wanted to take a moment to introduce our guest, Jill Bialowski.

Jill is a poet, a novelist, memoirist, and a longtime editor. Right now, she's the

executive editor and vice president at W.W. Norton. In other words, she's a person who spent

her whole life thinking deeply about language, storytelling, and how we make meaning, often out of

the hardest parts of life. She tackles topics that are very close to the heart of this show.

Memory, family, motherhood, all things that if you're listening to this show,

you're probably thinking about a lot.

Jill's novel, The Deceptions, is such a good read.

I love this book.

It follows a woman at Midlife, whose marriage is fraying just as her only child

leaves home. Jill also wrote a memoir about her younger sister, who took her own life when

she was 21, and about the grief and bewilderment her family lived with afterward. In her book,

poetry will save your life. She re-reads and reconsider reconsider poems that have been important to her throughout

her life. I'm sure you have some too, poems that you read when you were young that you'd love to go

back to and read again now that you're a different person. So I'm going to play for you Jill and

Vanessa's conversation now. They're going to be talking about Jill's newest memoir, which is called

The End is the Beginning, a Personal History of My Mother.

Of all of Jill's books, this one is probably the closest to this podcast in theme. It's about her mother, Iris, who died in 2020 after a long decline with Alzheimer's.

What makes this book so striking is its very unusual structure.

Jill tells her mother's life in reverse.

So the book begins with Iris's death during the first weeks of the COVID pandemic

...