Zibby is joined by New York Times bestselling author Charles Bock to discuss I WILL DO BETTER, a tender and searingly honest memoir about parenting his infant daughter in the wake of his wife’s untimely death. Charles shares the heartbreaking story of losing his wife Diana to leukemia just days before their daughter Lily’s third birthday. He reflects on becoming a single father, navigating his grief while raising his toddler, and deciding to write this memoir, capturing both the humor and the pain of his journey. He also delves into his writing process, which was shaped by his experiences as a novelist.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Charles. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss I Will Do Better, a father's memoir of heartbreak, parenting, and love.

Thank you. 

Charles: Oh my God. I'm so thrilled to be part of the Zibby verse and happy to be here. Yeah. 

Zibby: Well, your story and the way you wrote it and everything that happened, my heart just broke for you over and over again. And I'm so. honored that you shared your story with the world. You easily could have not, right?

You could have decided to keep this to yourself. So I'm curious about your decision to write a book about it and put it all out there. But first, I just want to extend my deepest sympathies. So I'm so sorry for everything that you've gone through. 

Charles: Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. It's much appreciated.

It really is. Thank you. We're doing pretty well right now. So, you know, knock on wood. 

Zibby: Well, I'm glad to hear that. And I appreciated your epilogue and everything and all the updates. Can you tell listeners so they know what we're talking about, what your book is about, what has happened in your life and all of that?

Charles: Absolutely. A place to start is I never wanted to be a dad. Chunks of my twenties and thirties were really focused on literary success. I was married. My wife wanted a kid and my idea of parenting was strap up the baby Bjorn on weekends. Use the plural, tell people we are parenting, great. Lily was six months old when her mom was diagnosed with advanced leukemia, and Diana passed three days before Lily's third birthday.

So I'm 40 whatever years old, alone, grieving, money's running out, and I have this wonderful little girl, utterly dependent on me. I will do better is the story of our next two years from their ages three to five. It's a phrase I will do better that this parent and I'm sure so many of your listeners. I promised myself however many times a day, you know, I tried to write a love story and I tried to write a fairy tale.

I think the best of them, both, they take you to an edge. . And in the book I wrote, Lily and I, we do, we go through fire together. Chunks of the book are very funny, but a lot of it is, it's a very emotional book and I try to make the writing do justice to the story, and I think that's a good starting place.

Yeah. Yes. Oh my gosh. Introduce, uh, your many fine listeners. 

Zibby: Well, you take us through your whole relationship with Diana and meeting her and dating and falling in love and marriage and then by the time we get to the illness, we are so in it with you, right? We are rooting for you and your marriage and everything and, and then we are equally in Not equally, of course, nothing could compare, but we go through your own devastation because you just open up your heart like you open your veins to sort of bleed it out on the page.

And so we can see it and also see it from how you are trying to hold it together for Lily, which of course, even when nothing is going wrong, some days it's hard to hold it together. And here you have the weight of the staggering illness and loss and everything on you. How, at the time, were you getting through the day to day in the illness part?

Charles: Well, When Diana was ill, I mean, we got through one day at a time, and there was no other way, but like, what's in front of us? We were fortunate in some ways, in that we had people in New York, and people knew other people. And this was also at a point where the internet was allowing us to set up schedules for people who want to stop by with food, for people who kind of stop by Wednesday night and give me a break with the baby.

I was sleeping when Diana was going through her various bone marrow transplants, which she went through two of them. I would sleep at the hospital with her. So we, we were able to navigate, like Diana's mother took the baby for a while. It was, it was piecemeal. It was, It was whatever you need to do that day.

Someone had told me very early. In fact, a doctor told me very early that the people who get through this stuff, learn how to live with uncertainty. And I remember thinking, I can do that because I've written a novel. I know, I know what uncertainty is because I spent 10 years living underwater, not knowing if I would ever finish or if it would ever be published or what would happen.

So we, that was something. And Diana had two bone marrow transplants. She was in remission. She almost made it to that year marker where they feel that the first one was a success and then the cancer returned. The second time was really crazy and intense. It was experimental. And then when it came back, you know, it's like you're just digging deeper, deeper into a hole.

And, you know, you never, in our case, I never really could imagine her not being around. We had this little baby, it was the joy of her life. It was she was something she wanted so much was to be a mother and she was living for that baby if she had she if it was not for the chance to raise the child, she would have went off to a yoga retreat and just meditated the cancer away, you know, that was her idea.

But because there was the baby, she put subjected herself to everything. To everything medical science could throw at her. And so we just dedicated ourselves to that. With, and I never really discussed, even towards the end, and what do we do, or what happens if this goes the other way, even as it was going.

You know pretty clearly going the other way, but you just don't you don't want to accept you don't accept it You can't believe that that's what's going to happen. So Yeah, that was how we kind of that was that was that part 

Zibby: And then of course you kept having all these obstacles thrown in your way. Tell the story that you write about in the book when you were sliding around on your lobby floor and got injured yourself. 

Charles: Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, probably Not even three weeks after she passed during Christmas week, so everyone is out of town and each night, you know, we play me and the toddler is 3 years old. She's just three years old. She's just had her third birthday. And each night we play games in the lobby. We play hide and seek and chase each other.

And sometimes I'll go into the elevator, go down a floor and then ride up and surprise her. And we've gone through the night. I just want to get her to bed. It's been an easy night. And she wants to play hallway and run around and she runs into the elevator and goes all the way downstairs. And I was wearing my socks and I followed her.

We're playing chase. And when the elevator hits the lobby, I go bolting out and I thought, Oh, I'll do Tom Cruise risky business. You know, I had pants on, a little different than him. But I'm in my socks and after about five seconds of running, when I start the slide, uh, you know, ass over tea kettle, pardon my French. And I, I landed super hard right in the middle of that on that stone floor. I, fractured my, my hip. I totally destroyed my elbow. Like I, this is like the surgical reconstruction of the elbow and, you know, landing right next to a Christmas tree, the, the management company, Christmas tree. And the baby is the toddler.

She's right there. And she thought it was the funniest thing in the world. She thought it was so funny, Daddy, and his funny falls. And that, that really did. That was not even three weeks after the, uh, after she passed. And I was like stuck on the, on the floor with the toddler and, you know, like had to, you know, and the book does not spend time documenting like how we got back up to the apartment, who I call, what do I do, but that in itself was an ordeal.

One of the things I did try to do in the book was to concentrate on the things that mattered most. And not get caught down these alleys that are really interesting and could be an episode in a miniseries, you know, like where they stop time and it's just all going to be, it's going to be the bear Christmas dinner only in a lobby.

I didn't, you know, I tried not to do that, but yeah, that was like welcomed, you know, I already was. Grieving and, and so worried, but that did, that sent me out of my mind in terms of grief and what the hell am I going to do and the whole nine. Yeah. And that's, that starts the book that literally, you know, that's within tip page 10 of the book.

Yeah. 

Zibby: Well, it gives, gives new meaning to being shattered by loss, right? You literally were. Crumbling. Shattered. But I think it is in moments like that where you see the complexity of being a single father and what do you do when you are the only person, right? You're her person, but now you're hurt and what happens and even the logistics of that and how do you deal with your own grief and then have to deal with your own body and whatever issues that brings.

I mean, you don't just get to. stop time to grieve, right? It's in the, it just has to get folded into the rest of life and all of the terrible and good things that happen next, right? 

Charles: No, you're, you're so right. And you have so many points in what you just said. One is I didn't carry the baby in my body for nine months.

I did not have that. The motherly prenatural. Connection that is so important and such a deep part of it's such a deep part of, you know, motherhood. It defines motherhood in some ways, but there are things you're the podcast is called books for moms who don't have time to read, like being a parent and being the primary parent is All consuming.

It is everything. There are probably people who are going to listen to this while they're folding laundry and preparing a lunch and figuring out their, whatever their, their job situation and this and that. And in some ways that's a chosen part. In some ways, it's biological, but it's still, it sucks. It's really hard.

I was a little different in that I got conscripted into it, and there's still this beautiful, wonderful child who doesn't know where mommy is, doesn't understand that mommy's not coming back, asks for mommy each day after I explain where mommy's in the clouds, mommy's you know, I don't know when she's coming back listens and then ask, but when, when, when we're what we're going to do when she comes back, etc, etc.

And that is grounding in some ways, because, you know, there's a crappy action movie from the 80s where, where someone says, Donald Schwarzenegger, I ain't got time to bleed. Well, you don't have time, because the baby needs, the child needs what she needs. And I don't know what I would have done, honestly, after, if I was married and did not have a child, I do not know how untethered my grief would have been.

But in this case, I had to, I had to take care of that little girl. And I didn't, that didn't mean I wanted to. It didn't mean I was, I think part of the book is the fact that I'm a flawed, selfish guy taking on the most foreign thing. That's the book, you know, I'm sure there's readers and listeners out there who have a partner They wish was doing more who thinks they're doing a lot I was that guy, you know I was who makes his what reasons and excuses I was that person and a big part of this book is learning to take is learning not just to physically be present but the emotional truth of having to accept. This is the journey, and this is a beautiful journey, and even when the child is destroying you and making you nuts, that's kind of beautiful, there's a humor and a beauty to it that you have to embrace, and I tried to write about that.

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out that I needed to write about that, and then, how to do it, and then how to do it in a way that keeps the pages turning and, and, and prescribes to all the things that we really love in a good book. 

Zibby: Tell me more about that process and, and how you did that. And I have to say, I feel like you were quite hard on yourself throughout the book.

I mean, your description of yourself as the selfish dad or whatever. I mean, you detail throughout, like, your shortcomings and, you know, the failures and what you wish you'd accomplished and sort of comparisons to others and all of that stuff was, I feel like, mixed in and scattered throughout. 

Charles: I was raised in a Jewish household in Las Vegas to two pawnbrokers, so that comes, like, being hard on myself is like a daily, uh, it's like a daily minutely occurrence, so that comes, and that was pretty, That's organic.

And I think also it's fear that that there's a deep was a deep fear that I couldn't do it. I think each day I still probably have that. Uh, I still wrestle with that. Am I? a good enough. Am I able to do this? I don't know what I'm doing. And whatever guilt about the fact that that I in some ways dragged along for the ride, you know, and so that does eat at me and it comes out, it comes out.

But it's very nice of you to, to, to say that, that maybe it's might be so unnecessary, but I think there's probably a lot of parents and a lot of people out there who feel you can't be, you're not good enough. I, myself, it came out in watching the other moms. in the courtyard at pre k pickup, and they always had way better food than my little sad cheese stick, you know, and, and, and picking up seaweed snacks, but then showing up with the wasabi snacks instead of ones that a three year old can eat.

I would look at them and, and just marvel and, and be jealous, And then also in the book, there's a moment where I overhear them talking, going, having the same discussions with one another that are running through my head. So, uh, so hopefully that self flagellation is something that people will recognize and, and as opposed to someone who's, this is crazy or someone unnecessarily making a mountain out of nothing.

You know, I don't think it's ladies who launch neuroses. 

Zibby: And go back to the process and even your own writing career prior to the book, what you said earlier that you knew you could survive anything with uncertainty because you're a novelist. And that's like one of the best quotes ever. Um, 

Charles: if it involves long term and like planning and not getting reward, you know, and like planning.

Yeah. Yeah. Like the calm before the nothing and all that. I can live, I know what that is. Like I can, I, I, that's something that, that is endemical to learning how to write a book and then moving through these processes. Even, even I find writers who've been to really excellent MFA programs, They have no idea, you can't know what you're getting into, you just, you can't, you know, just what that, and there's no exit strategy because I spent 10 years writing my first novel.

My first novel, Beautiful Children, which is about Las Vegas and teen runaways and the very adult sides of Las Vegas, took me a very long time to write. And I, for probably four years of it, I was telling myself, I'll be done in three months. I'll be done in five months. It reached a point where no one ever believed I would be done.

My friends, my family stopped asking about it. I was the crazy person, you know, building a cityscape out of mashed potatoes in the basement. You know, like, like, sure, yeah, that's going to the loop. Absolutely. You, you know, go, go get some more gravy. This was never going to happen, except I did somehow finish it.

And it came out in 2008, which is a while ago now, but it had a moment. And it looked, and then I thought I was going to have a, you know, a chance at kind of a serious writing career. And, uh, and my wife and our baby was born in December of that year. And we used the option money for the, from the movie studio to place the first payment along with my parents helping me on a, on a little house on the border of New Hampshire and Vermont.

And months. That's actually where Diana was when she got sick and was diagnosed with, with, with her cancer. And we sold. And I immediately knew like, there's no way that we can pay for all that's going on and the house. So we sold the house at a loss within, within months with, I don't think it was within this first year.

I think we sold it and, and lost lost a good chunk for, and, and then everything just went sideways. Everything went sideways. And that was, that was like my lead up to, to what was going on and, um, yeah. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So, why did you not stop writing the novel? Like, when everybody was doubting you and it was taking forever, what was it that kept calling you back to that story?

Charles: That's such a good question. That's such a good question, Zibby. There's lots of answers to that. One, I had nothing else going for me. I wasn't going to like go to my career as an advertising executive, you know, I wasn't, I had zero going on. I was like third shift legal proofreader type guy who jobs so that I didn't have to take any more jobs than necessary.

So I could write the book. I was convinced that I was going to get it right and I was convinced like whether that that's what it took that that's just how it worked for for people or for that's how it was going to work for me. And there's a point where, you know, I did go to grad school for this, and every now and then I would check in with a professor or check in with someone, and I had someone, a wonderful, wonderful teacher, a Ukrainian man named Oskol Melnichuk, told me at some point, you know, it's just time.

Like, what's another year? If it takes another year, what's another year? And so I was like, yeah, sure, sure. But there were large forces saying that, everything suggested I would never finish that book. And I just knew I had to, I had to get to the end to see what would happen. That if I stop, I tell this to writing students, if you stop, you know what happens.

You know, and I had a, there was a point where I finished an early draft and I thought I was done and I went looking for an agent and I had saved chits and I had had some friends who had done pretty well who were going to open doors for me and I used every card and it went to the agents. And then with some, it went to a certain point and it seemed like it was going well, but none of them wanted it.

And I had a long talk with a wonderful writer, a woman named Mary Beth Hughes, and she said, This is just the process. This is just what it takes. This is a draft. This isn't finished, unless it's, unless you're done, unless you want to try something else, unless you want to start a new book, and I didn't want to start a new book.

So I was like, okay, all right, either, either I'm done and I have nothing, or I'm going to figure out how to, how to write this book. I'm going to find my way through. And I built from a flawed draft. And it took however long it took, I was able to do that, I was younger, now my 20s and my 30s did get burned doing this, like there was a cost, there was a time where friends would like have their pictures from Jamaica, and they're, they, they went to They went to see where Kafka, you know, this is where Kafka banged his head against a wall, you know, and in Prague, and I have, well, I have chapter three.

Well, I have a fridge full of fridge full of moldy food takeout. I have a dog that needs to be walked and I have chapter three. That's what I have to show for my summer, you know. And it is, it's a gamble. It was a gamble, but I also ended up with a book that I look at. And I do get to say, let's say to my daughter, who's now 15 and who's been told her whole life, she can read this filthy book when it's, she turns 16.

I told her, if you want to know who I was during my twenties and in my thirties. Beautiful Children is that it reflects flaws, overriding, but also longs, beautiful, beautiful stretches. It has a reflection of that. I think that I will do better. I hope if the first book is like, what, here's what I look, what I can do.

Look at me. This book is, this book is, uh, hopefully a more mature. I want to say work of art, but I don't think you get to call your own work a work of art attempt at a attempt at telling a very very.. A story that couldn't be more important to me right and and tried to be a more mature person deep in life looking at these moments that really defined me and had to define my daughter and somehow we made it through and i'm very proud of that Yeah, I hope and think readers you know, what's wonderful is the response has been that it's not a long book, and people have been like, I read it in a sitting, I read it in two sittings, you know, I, that, and I tried to make it be a something that you could, that would be immersive and fun to read and, and do justice to what I think of as a wonderful reading experience, what I hope would be a wonderful reading experience.

Zibby: Well, I definitely think you accomplished that. I also think it's ironic that you started the conversation saying how, and you write about this in the book as well, how you didn't want children for a long time, and yet your book is called Beautiful Children, like the whole time you're saying you don't want them.

It's, you know, I mean, like, that's what you were creating. 

Charles: No, it's, it's absolutely, you know, it's such a good point, and I would never have thought of that, but the truth is, the kid, the protagonist of the novel, of Beautiful Children, is a deeply, deeply hard kid to like. 

And he's a troubled child, but he's still 12.

He doesn't know any better and he's beautiful. And these teen runaways, same thing, beautiful, but also off track, went sideways, all of us, we go in these directions. And that was my guiding idea in writing that I would have never, could have never predicted my own fatherhood, or that I would love being a, even as it drives me nuts every single minute of the day, that I would love it so much that it would mean so much to me that it's so nourishing.

And yes, you're absolutely right. I could have never known, you know, man plans, God laughs. I would have never, and never thought that this was that direction. But I also am so glad that it is. You know what, my, the three year old from the book is 15 now, and she's an amazing, amazing person. She's going to be an even more amazing person.

I'm lucky enough to have a, a six year old daughter who will save the, save the race. She'll, you know, like, will save the, help save this, this misbegotten race and our, our, our failed planet, you know, like, it's wonderful. Yeah, yeah. And I know. I'm not alone in feeling that, but I also know men don't say that.

Men don't know how to say that, and I thought this was an opportunity for one to try and get that down. 

Zibby: Thank you. My gosh. Well, Charles, congratulations. This book is beautiful. Everyone's going to be reading it. I will do better. Amazing. Thank you for writing it. Thank you for not giving up, and thanks for the time you spent with me today.

Charles: Oh, you're the best, Zibby. Thank you so much, so much, and in all facets of your burgeoning things. Thank you. Good luck. Thank you. And thank you everyone for listening to me ramble. I appreciate it. 

Zibby: Thank you. Thanks for the time. Bye bye.