Jill Bialosky is renowned as much for her memoirs of family (“History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life”) as for her confessional poetry (“Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections”).
Now the W.W. Norton executive editor and part-time Bridgehampton resident will be at The Church in Sag Harbor to read from her latest, “The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother,” out this week from Washington Square Press. The reading, for which admission is $10, or $5 for members, starts at 4 p.m. on Saturday, to be followed by a conversation with Sheri Pasquarella, The Church’s executive director.
The “end” of the book’s title is the death of Iris Yvonne Bialosky at an assisted-care facility at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in March of 2020, the isolation of that time making it all the more difficult for her daughter to deal with her grief. The “beginning” has to do with the progression of Iris’s life, as told by her daughter, from the loss of her own mother at a young age to the death of her first husband early in their marriage to struggles with depression.
This is her story.