Publishers Weekly
08/19/2024
Novelist Bock (Alice & Oliver) offers an unvarnished account of raising his daughter, Lily, after his wife, Diana, died of leukemia. Days before Lily’s third birthday party, a very ill Diana died, confusing Lily and making Bock, then 42, panic about the future. Overcome by grief, with “no full-time job, no investments, no retirement account, barely a pot to piss in,” he considered sending Lily to live with Diana’s family in Tennessee but decided against it, choosing instead to tackle childcare, preschool, and Lily’s tempestuous emotions by himself. With dry humor, Bock recounts the pitfalls (“The male’s capacity to feel sorry for himself is bottomless”), including his failed attempts to ignite new romances and an accident in which he broke his elbow when Lily was a toddler. He’s bracingly honest about his flaws, sharing his therapist’s observation that he “spent a considerable amount of adult history avoiding responsibility,” but the self-incrimination is offset with tender recollections of his and Diana’s courtship and his palpable love for Lily, who, by 13, is “radioactive hell on wheels... in the best way.” Single parents will find much to identify with in this warts-and-all account. Agent: Barbara Jones, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Oct.)
bestselling author of The Love Affairs of Nathanie Adelle Waldman
Charles Bock’s brilliant and absorbing new memoir of raising a toddler on his own—while trying to come to terms with loss and generally struggling to keep the lights on—is as magical and effervescent as Lily, the little girl at the book’s center. The book radiates with feeling, humor and insight—into parenting, the city, ambition. Although it is about the attempt to move forward (or at least to keep going) after tragedy, I Will Do Better is nevertheless a joy to read—bursting with beauty and life even as it resists any hint of sentimentality or cliche. One of the best memoirs I’ve read in years.
New York Times bestselling author of I Have Some Q Rebecca Makkai
I Will Do Better is searingly honest and compulsively readable—a memoir of survival, grief, and the fathomless ways our fates are tethered to those of people we lose, people we fail, people we love. This book will get deep under your skin.
author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father Alysia Abbott
A moving tale about an unimaginable challenge. I couldn’t help but root for this dad and his little girl, swept along by the precarity of their situation as much as by their evident bond . . . In the end, I Will Do Better made me want to ‘do better.’
New York Times bestselling author of Our Country F Gary Shteyngart
More tender than the night is Charles Bock’s large menschy heart. And more tender still is the prose he brings to I Will Do Better, a true story that encompasses and conveys the ultimate sadness and the most profound hope.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-05-24
A widowed father struggles with the challenges of single parenting his toddler in New York City.
Bock, the author of the acclaimed novelsBeautiful Children andAlice & Oliver, the latter of which fictionalizes his experience of losing his wife to cancer, turns to memoir to document the challenging period after her death. Diana died three days before her daughter Lily's third birthday. “I concentrated on the tasks at hand: making calls to a woman who ran a funeral home out of her Brooklyn apartment (for a reasonable price she handled the cremation); following up with a Ninth Avenue bakery (confirming the color of the iced letters, the birthday message on the double-chocolate cake).” The interplay between grieving and child rearing continues throughout, and Bock holds himself to a high standard of honesty and self-revelation, per the Montaigne epigraph that opens the book. In general, his literary references are well chosen and interestingly deployed. He finds inspiration in the memoir of Beat poet Diane di Prima, who refused to cave to pressure from Jack Kerouac to blow off the promise she'd made to her babysitter to stay at a party. Bock’s analysis of Sylvia Plath's famous poem, “Daddy,” centers on pointing out, “If you are a father…this poem is an absolute terror.” In his distinctive prose style, both lyrical and muscular, Bock evokes a chaotic kaleidoscope of tones—irony, anger, literary ambition, fierce parental protectiveness, loneliness, toxic masculinity—as he handles topics from simultaneously dating two women who don't know about each other to his and Lily's experiences during Hurricane Sandy. Bock doesn’t mention his relationship with writer Leslie Jamison, who documented their brief, stormy marriage in her recent memoir,Splinters. Given the tone of that book, this seems like an admirable choice.
A uniquely forthright and powerful addition to the literature of fatherhood.
