Free Download I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love by Charles Bock
English | October 1, 2024 | ISBN: 1419774425 | True EPUB | 208 pages | 1.4 MB
By turns comical and heartbreaking, I Will Do Better is the remarkable journey of two defiant and wounded people, and their personal growth in the name of love.
The novelist Charles Bock was a reluctant parent, tagging along for the ride of fatherhood, obsessed primarily with his dream of a writing career.
But when his daughter Lily was six months old, his wife, Diana, was diagnosed with a complex form of leukemia. Two and half years later, when all treatments and therapies had been exhausted, Bock found himself a widower-devastated, drowning in medical bills, and saddled with a daunting responsibility. He had to nurture Lily, and, somehow, maybe even heal himself.
I Will Do Better is Charles’s pull-no-punches account of what happened next. Playdates, music classes, temper tantrums, oh-so-cool babysitters, first days at school, family reunions, single-parent dating, and a citywide crippling natural disaster-were minefields especially treacherous for Charles and Lily because of their preexisting vulnerability: their grief.
Charles sought help from friends, family, and therapists, but this overgrown, middle-aged boy-man and his plucky child became, foremost, a duo-they found their way together.
This frank and tender memoir of parenting his infant daughter in the wake of of his wife’s untimely death is "bracingly honest [and] tender," commented Publshers Weekly. "Single parents will find much to identify with in this warts-and-all account."