What To Read

Jill Bialosky’s The End Is the Beginning was shaped by devastating loss. Her mother died during the early weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown, isolated in a care facility, with no chance for a final goodbye. In the stillness and grief of that moment—when the world itself felt suspended—Bialosky turned to language as a way to process absence, memory, and connection.

The result is a memoir told in reverse, tracing her mother Iris Yvonne Bialosky’s life backward—from her final days through her adulthood and back to her girlhood in mid-century Cleveland. It’s a portrait of a woman shaped by beauty, sorrow, and quiet resilience. Written with the precision of a poet and the care of a daughter, the book is both a personal elegy and a meditation on what we inherit from those who came before us.

To mark Mother’s Day, we asked Bialosky to share a few books that have helped her reflect on the complexities of motherhood.

These are a few of the many books I have read over the years about mothers and motherhood that have stayed with me. My mother died during the first month of COVID-19 just as the forsythias were beginning to bloom. The forsythias remind me of my childhood raised by a single mother. Even as a child, I recognized spring was on its way when the shock of the yellow buds awakened our small backyard from the crusts of winter. Books too, have a way of worming themselves inside and blooming again when we don’t expect to remember them. Here are some of the novels that have allowed me to recognize the complexity between mothers and daughters, how deep the bond is, no matter the circumstances, and the complicated nature of mothers who also are striving to forge their own ambitions. —Jill Bialosky

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

Two admired books about the mother-daughter bond are works by Jamaica Kincaid. In her first novel, Annie John, she writes about a young girl coming of age on the island of Antigua. It is the story of the loss of childhood and celebrates the intense bond between Annie and her mother. Her mother is her sole focus and world. Her mother is her shadow-life.

The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

In this novel, the early loss of protagonist Xuela Claudette Richardson’s mother during childbirth makes her unable to form lasting attachments. Throughout the novel, a deep and fierce longing for maternal love persists. “Motherless women have no protector, no guide, no model for negotiating the fraught relationship between the feminine and the masculine, no one to reassure them in the most basic human way that the world is interested in making room for them.” Perhaps because I lost my own father at age two, this novel particularly struck a chord and made me reflect on what it meant to be fatherless and how that shaped my own attachments.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

One of the finest novels in the English language. Mrs. Ramsey, the mother of eight, represents the traditional nineteenth-century mother. Devoted to her family, she has lost her own passion. The novel can be read as a feminist cautionary tale about saving parts of ourselves as mothers. It also highlights the mother/artist binary. Mrs. Ramsey embodies the Victorian mother, while her friend, artist Lily Briscoe, represents the independent artist. Only after Mrs. Ramsey’s death can Lily finish her painting, satisfying Virginia Woolf’s desire to release women beyond motherhood.

The Neapolitan Novels Boxed Set by Elena Ferrante

The Ferrante Quartet is an incredible set of books about the forceful and passionate friendship between Lenu and Lila that takes them from young children until old age as they navigate the tensions and violence in their neighborhood in Naples, Italy. I recommend the quartet for anyone who is struggling between her own desires and her role as a mother. Once Lenu marries and has children she longs to have the time to write. When I came upon a passage where her husband reacts with sarcasm to the idea she deserves time, and another character calls it a political crime to waste a woman’s intelligence—my heart stopped. Enough said. Read it!

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

It’s no wonder that I fell in love with this novel as a young girl with four sisters and a longing to be a writer. Never was there more of a devoted mother and wife than Margaret March, or Marmee as she is called by her daughters. Marmee is the moral center of the novel. Her role is to encourage her daughters as they evolve from adolescence into women. She represents the ideal mother who hovers over her daughters. However, Marmee is more complicated then she appears. If you haven’t read this novel that filled me with want and fortitude, you are missing out.

First Love by Gwendoline Riley

In Gwendoline Riley’s fierce novel, First Love, Neve’s mother is self-absorbed, sad, and petty. James Wood, in his review of the novel along with Riley’s My Phantoms, in The New Yorker, writes, “I don’t recall reading many novels as grotesquely honest about the original sin of being born to inadequate parents.” Later in the review he writes “Mothers, alas, stick around longer and want more, cleaving to their adult children with a sickly persistence.” First Love is a devastating, cruel, and often crude portrait of a daughter trying to forge her own life in a complicated marriage, only to continually be tortured by her mother’s self-interests. Why read a devastating portrait of motherhood? Mothers sometimes can’t get past themselves to care adequately for their daughters, and in this novel, we see the repercussions. I couldn’t put it down.