Readers preparing to open Charles Bock's I Will Do Better: A Father's Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love should get comfortable, take a deep breath, and otherwise gear up--for heartache, yes, but also for the rewards of uncommonly good writing on the rigmarole of single parenting.
Bock's wife, Diana, was diagnosed with leukemia when their daughter, Lily, was six months old; Diana died in 2011, three days before Lily's third birthday. Bock, author of the novels Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver (his fictionalized account of losing Diana), serves up unprettified--and lovelier for it--passages about his first two fraught years of solo parenting. He's equally truth-baring about other trials of his life at the time, like figuring out how to support a child in Manhattan on one income and determining when and how to forge ahead with a new romance (fine: sex partner). Readers can expect a roughly one-to-one correspondence between humor-tinged scenes and knife-to-the-heart moments (Lily: "Why don't I get to have a mom?").
While one pleasure of I Will Do Better is observing Lily coming to terms--inch by inch, yogurt pouch by yogurt pouch--with the tragedy that befell her, the same can be said about witnessing the evolution of Bock, who goes from "one of those fathers who sometimes, despite himself, referred to his infant as 'it' " to a man so deep in the parenting groove that at one point he wonders, "Who in their right mind wants a refrigerator without yogurt pouches?" --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer