I Will Do Better

August 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.

September 1, 2024
Unexpected tragedy brings out the best and the worst in us, as the author discovers when his beloved wife dies after a yearslong struggle with leukemia, leaving him to raise their toddler daughter, Lily, alone. Bock brings readers along on his journey of learning how to grieve, how to heal, and how to care for his daughter. He had been a reluctant father to begin with, determined instead to focus on his writing career, which left him ill-equipped to handle the ups and downs of child-rearing solo. Playdates, mean girls, dating as a single parent, and the everyday practicalities of life are all a challenge in the absence of his capable partner. Bock is exceptionally honest with his feelings, never afraid to expose sadness, anger, or painfully awkward moments, all of which make his story highly relatable to anyone who has ever grieved the loss of a loved one and particularly to anyone who has ever helped a child grieve the loss of a parent.

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Starred review from July 1, 2024
A widowed father struggles with the challenges of single parenting his toddler in New York City. Bock, the author of the acclaimed novels Beautiful Children and Alice & 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 reason-able 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.

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