Charles Bock on Grief, Musicals, and Montaigne
Charles Bock and his wife, Diana Joy Colbert, were parents of a six-month-old daughter, Lily, when they received devastating news: Diana had acute myeloid leukemia. The parents were soon thrust into a labyrinthine medical care system as they pursued every resource to combat Diana’s illness. Shortly before Lily’s third birthday, Diana died, and Charles was faced with the monumental task of caring for and raising a child on his own. I Will Do Better is Bock’s moving account of the two years that followed, as he and Lily formed a new family unit amidst their grief and he had to confront his complicated feelings about fatherhood. Readers might be familiar with Bock from his previous novels, Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver, both of which were published to great acclaim. Critics have greeted I Will Do Better with similar praise. In its starred review, Kirkus called it “a uniquely forthright and powerful addition to the literature of fatherhood,” while Rebecca Makkai hailed it as “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.”
The memoir kicks off with a quote from Michel de Montaigne, “Had my intention been to seek the world’s favor, I should surely have adorned myself with borrowed beauties.” Can you talk about why that quote spoke to you as you began this memoir?
Oh absolutely. I wanted something French and pretentious that would draw everyone in. (laughs) A very dear friend of mine, when we were in our late twenties, introduced me to Montaigne. That quote always killed me. The whole quote is actually its own little essay, “To the Reader.” It talks about how he wished he was naked because he just wants to present himself fully and wholly as he is. He signs it, “Farewell, Montaigne.” It’s something from so far long ago and it always just kills me, because you feel his life. He wants this honest version of who he is. The end of the quote is, “As my friends lose me, as soon they must, herein will remain some trace of who I was, so I’d like to be fully myself.” I felt that [this book] presented this massive challenge to me, in that if I was going to tell the story of me and Lily and these two years in our lives, these seminally important years, then I had to be real. That meant no adornments. It meant admitting things that were very hard for me to admit, things that I couldn’t fully commit myself to saying. It meant having to move through [those things] and figure out artistically and technically how do I do this? It seemed so compelling to me, this matter of how do I raise this girl? How do I admit that it wasn’t something I wanted to do, but had to grow into? Even after I grew into it—wanting to do it and taking on the responsibility, not just physically but emotionally—that didn’t help me that much. It solved nothing! (laughs) How do I convey that and still have a reader? That was a big technical question. I didn’t know if I could do it, so I plopped that Montaigne [quote] at the front of the book so that every time I opened the file, there it was waiting for me.
The marketing for the book sometimes refers to you as a “reluctant” parent or as a man-child. Can you talk about what your attitude towards fatherhood was before Lily was born?
My parents were married for over fifty years and it was a rocky marriage. They were committed to each other, they loved each other, but they were also like snakes that were eating each other. I grew up with that. I grew up wanting to get out of Vegas, to do amazing things with my life, to see the world, to write. I got involved with trying to write fiction and having a kid was just not on my radar. In your early twenties, for men, I don’t know if it really is. I think the act of what it takes to have a child is something we all want to do as much as possible, but then to actually have a baby, not so much. When I fell in love and got married to Diana it was very clear that she wanted a baby. Someone very close to me said you can’t tell the woman you love she can’t have a baby. No one can do that. That was profound to me, that someone needed to tell me that.
I entered into fatherhood thinking, “I’ll be Dad when I’m not writing. She wants to be a mom, let her be a mom. I’ll swoop in on weekends and put on the Baby Bjorn. I’ll use the plural, ‘We’re parenting.’” It was not the biggest priority. It was profound to watch the baby be born, that was a changing moment. But even up to when Diana was sick, there was tension in our marriage because I wasn’t fully on board with the whole baby thing. That was what she wanted for her life. It was so important to her life. I wanted to write. The truth is that to do good work it takes time, it takes solitude, and I was covetous of it. It had taken me such a long time to write that first book, and [the fact] that I was having even a taste of that attention and success, I wanted more.
The title is so evocative and seems to reveal multiple layers as you read the memoir. At what point in the writing process did the title emerge?
Late, so late. There were other titles for the book while I was writing. I Will Do Better came late, and even then, I was like, “It should be called ‘I Will do Better/ When Will You Do Better?’” Late in the book, at an important time, the kid devastates me with that question. I thought it was a funny title. It’s clever and smart and we could put a slash in there that would make it look cool and modern. But then on the page, it looks so long and it’s so convoluted. The truth is, every parent, every day, there’s something you mess up. In the back of your mind you think, “I’ll do better, I’ve got to do better than this.” A million times a day. I didn’t know it was that good of a title until I started getting responses like “I say that” or “I know that” or “I feel that way.” Then I was like, “Oh, that’s a good title.”
The memoir focuses mostly on two years of your and Lily’s lives, from when Lily is three to when she turns five. Why did you choose those years as the timeframe for your book?
Those years are so important to me as a human being. The following year, other events happened and some of them would have involved putting new people in the book and expanding its scope. As I looked at how to write about this, it seemed to me that an intense, fairly focused period where important decisions have to be made was a way I could manage to make every scene important, to make every paragraph filled with energy and life. It also stripped away any excess so that I could really pay attention to the language, which is so important to the book. I teach Mark Haddon’s The Curious Case of the Dog in the Nighttime, and I feel that’s a book where the pages are like potato chips, you can’t stop turning them, you can’t stop eating. I wanted to write a book that anyone could start to read and would not put down. [You could read it in] one or two sessions, everything’s focused, everything matters, and that could make for something exciting. I wanted this to be an exciting reading experience and so I focused on when it was because I don’t think I could keep up that level of pace—because it also takes patience to get everything in there, presented in a way that people want—for three hundred, four hundred pages. Gatsby is 129 pages and it’s everything we want. My first two books, each one had weight and heft. This one, I tried to alter the equation of how much candy, how much medicine.
Lily serves as the co-anchor of the memoir. What was her input into the memoir?
She would probably have a very different answer than I would. (laughs) There would be times when I would tell her about the scene I was writing and she would say a memory and it would shock me. I hadn’t thought of it at all, I didn’t see her perspective that way. I would be like, “Oh, okay,” and then I would rush back and feel it and use whatever I could. We would have these conversations about parts of it. She wanted to read it very, very much, even as I was writing. She read the excerpt in The New Yorker, which was published a couple of years ago. She came back to me afterwards and said, “I know that’s us, but I felt so deeply for the two people on the page, for that man and his little girl. I know that all happened to us, but I really felt for them.” That was really one of the moments where I felt I did something right.
I wanted to talk about your and Lily’s love of musicals, which is a throughline of the memoir.
My sister loved musicals. I can remember very much her watching Singin’ in the Rain and having a crush on Gene Kelly. My mother used to sing and dance with us in the kitchen and mangle lyrics constantly. She’d grown up in New York and loved musicals. When Lily’s mom got sick, it was such a crazy time. I was constantly scared of, “What am I going to do? How am I going to do this?” Sometime during that [period], an actress said to me, “Play her musicals. Musicals are love.” That opened untold doors. It made so much sense. I immediately of course thought of my sister, I thought of my mom. So we started. It wasn’t like now, where literally every single thing is on YouTube. I would get DVDs, The Sound of Music. She was watching A Chorus Line at an age when she shouldn’t have been watching A Chorus Line. My parents came to visit and she sang “At the Ballet” to them, every word. Every night at bedtime, it became a deep part of our lives. Elsa was an important figure. Also, little Gretl from Sound of Music, and the “sad little clanging in the clock in the hall and the bells in the steeple too.” It’s still imprinted. I knew that this was part of the book. It’s a huge part of our lives. My daughter would go on to take singing lessons and now she’s at a professional performing arts high school in Hell’s Kitchen. We still talk about musicals constantly, what we’re going to see, what we can afford to see. I can get deep into our conversations about Funny Girl. It still continues.
And finally, what role has the library played in your life?
I learned to read at the library. In Las Vegas when I was growing up, the bookstores were all used bookstores, and the biggest sections in them were guides on how to get rich at the card games. So my mom took me to the library, Clark County Public Library on Flamingo Road. I fell in love with books sitting under this stairwell to the second floor, which was where all the books were. I would sit under there with my brothers and sister, eat food from the vending machines, and read books. I love that public library. The last time I was in Vegas I took Lily there to see an art exhibit of showgirl dresses. It was beautiful.
It seems to me that libraries are a cradle of decency, a carrier of civilization, and a carrier of what it means to be human at this moment in our cultural history. It’s hard to think of another place that carries as much weight and offers succor to anyone and everyone. I love spending time at the Epiphany Branch and the Midtown Branch [of the New York Public Library]. I spend a lot of time in the Brooklyn branches. Very rarely do I fail to come away nourished.
Tags: Charles Bock, grief, memoir
