I WILL DO BETTER

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 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.