The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love by Charles Bock

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love by Charles Bock Amazon.com 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. Named one of the Best Books of Fall by Oprah Daily and People "A uniquely forthright and powerful addition to the literature of fatherhood.” (Kirkus) 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.”

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Zoom in there, ladies. Things of that mix official. Welcome to the big show. We're so appreciative, guys.

As always, for 16 years and over 2,000 episodes, we bring you the Chris Voss Show. And during it, we need you to tell your friends, neighbors, relatives to subscribe to it or else. No, I'm just kidding. Go to goodreads.com for Chess Chris Voss. LinkedIn.com for Chess Chris Voss. Chris Voss, one of the TikTokity and all those crazy places on the Internet. Even dogs are telling their friends about it you can hear him in the right now my dog is telling his dog friends about the chris voss show and saying chris voss uses an old kiss intro oh great you recognized it you sir are the second or third person who's ever put that together

i love it you're the second or third person who ever put that together. I can make it. I love it. You're the second or third person who's put that together, where we came up with that. So an homage to a great band. Kiss. The greatest band in the world. In fact, we didn't even have it that bodacious. We just said, I think the line that we'd given them was for the scripting of the radio guy who'd read it. We gave them the line that says, the greatest podcast in the world, or not.

You know, we just kind of defaulted it. He's like, no, just fucking run with it. And I'm like, okay. Why not? Why not? Confidence will get you everywhere. We are going to be interviewing you today on your book, Charles Bach. We can hear you in the background.

It's called I Will Do Better, A Father's Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love. Out October 1st, 2024. You can order it now wherever fine books are sold, folks. Charles Bach joins us on the show today. Charles, welcome. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me, Chris. I'm enjoying

myself very much. That's what we try and do. We try and make everyone have a good time. So give us any dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs to get to know you better? Well, I do have a website, Charles Bach, I guess Squarespace. I'm on Facebook, if that's helpful. This is the truth. I'll be very honest with you.

I write. I teach. I teach writing. And I also, you know, I raise my daughters myself. I'm not super active in the world of social self-promotion because for what I do, there's a value in trying to keep that at bay. Now, then, after I spend however much time churning my guts out and trying to create something beautiful on the page, how I get it to people, I have no idea. There's where the disconnect, like your very kind, nice question,

and I don't know what to do. I think it was Abrams Books or... Abrams Books is an excellent publisher. They're in charge of all that promotion, so, yeah. Abrams Books is an excellent publisher. Plus, your daughters don't want to see down on TikTok and stuff. No, no, she really doesn't. So, Charles, give us the $30,000 over your new book and tell us what's inside of it.

Yeah, absolutely. I was married to a wonderful woman named Diana Colbert. And our daughter was six months old when Diana was diagnosed with advanced leukemia. Oh, wow. She passed three days before Lily's birthday, meaning I was 40-whatever years old. I'm alone, grieving, broke. And I had this wonderful little girl utterly dependent on me. I Will Do Better is the story of me and Lily during our next two years.

The title is a phrase I promised myself however many times a day. It's a phrase that every parent recognizes. I tried to write a love story and a fairy tale. The best of each takes you right up to an edge. In my case, this is the story of a flawed, selfish guy taking on the most foreign thing, the hardest responsibility, the heaviest load. It's an exploration of parenthood, of manhood, and it's the story of, you know, a little girl and her daddy. That's what I would say as a starting point. Yeah. You found yourself a widower, devastated, drowning in medical bills, saddled with a daunting responsibility. You've got to be both the feminine and the masculine for your daughter and play both parts of the role as you're alone. And of course, there's probably grief there and suffering and all the things that come

from loss. And so that can be a challenge as well. Absolutely. Diana had two bone marrow transplants. She fought for two and a half years and really did it so she could raise her little girl. On her own, if there wasn't a child involved, she probably would have went to a yoga retreat and tried to meditate away the cancer. But instead, she put herself through everything that Western medicine has. And Western medicine is is amazing but it's also unforgiving in many ways

you know they will throw astonishing amounts of science at things in her case she she went through it all and it did not save her it didn't and that left you know that was quite a journey in itself and it did leave me at the end of it grieving and also exhausted and go back to the apartment and everywhere you look there's memories and stories and with time that can be a good thing but immediately it was really hard it was a a huge a huge weight yes yeah you're living in you're living in the ghost of the past and you can see all the stuff that triggers those memories and it's hard it's hard to go through that it is and at the same time i also have a three-year-old looking up at me with big eyes and she doesn't understand and can't understand,

but she also needs to be taken care of. So in some ways, that prevented the full, utter, like, waking up in a gutter or what have you, because I couldn't. I couldn't. You know, like, the responsibility was still right there. So, you know, it was a lot. That's the starting point for the book. Yeah.

I will do better. And I mean, what a challenge. Now you've written, this is your third book. You've written two novels. Tell us a little about those so we can get a plug in for them. And of course, you know, this is your third book. So you've got writing down quite well. I don't thank you so much. I wish anyone was kind of a tiger that you're always chasing and it's always trying to eat your

face so i don't know how but i just let it eat my face yeah sometimes there's no better answer it's better take it my first novel is took place in vegas which is where i originally where i grew up where i was born and raised and it's about teen runaways and kind of the adult side of Las Vegas. It's called Beautiful Children. And it's a book that took me a very long time to write, but I'm also hugely proud of. It's a wild, dark, in places kind of metafictional book. And it was a kind of a young man trying to show everything that he could possibly do and put it all on the page the second novel is called alice and oliver and is a very different book and it's actually a fictionalized telling of a married couple in 1990s new york while it's gentrifying

and she's diagnosed with cancer and she's a young mother and and then this book has some elements of what happened of my grief but it's very much about me and a little girl in 2010's new york city during those two years where i really do have to look myself in the eye and grow up, not just show up, but also learn to want to do it. I had not really wanted to be a dad. I had wanted to be a writer. I wanted to chase whatever that meant. I spent a lot of time doing that, but I also had been told by people who were very close to me when you are spending your life with a woman when you love her you can't tell her she can't have a child yeah and so originally I went into it thinking that I would must the hair carry the put the the baby bjorn on you know use the plural we we're parenting

tell some stories at night time but that diana wanted to be a mom i was gonna let her be a mom and that wasn't the case that changed you know when she was when the baby was six months old. And so I had to learn a lot and I had to grow a lot and I had to get over myself and get over not wanting to do it. Even if get over feeling resentment on my shoulder about this being my lot now, which as you know, men, we're like the best at feeling sorry for ourselves. We have special, it's a special talent. I think men are just great at, you give us a chance to marinate in our own self-loathing, we will, I'll do it. I certainly will.

And I had to deal. You know, I also had to figure out how do you get through Saturday afternoon? That point where you've got the kid, the clock is not moving, and it's just like an endless slog. What do you do? So there was like the big life questions, but there also was the practical, how do I do this? Making sure that I'm not always putting the wrong shoes on the wrong feet, et cetera, et cetera. Tell us about your journey through life.

What inspired you to become a writer? How did you know when you were starting to write and influence you? Tell us how you got down this road. Oh, that's interesting. That's a good question. Yeah, we like to hear people's hero's journey. I always loved stories I always loved humor

I was a latchkey kid because my parents were always at work so I grew up with 3pm Gilligan's Islands you know as a lot of us did in that era when I was 12 or 13 I loved comic books and was very much trying to loved comic books and was very very much trying to write comic books

and trying to tell visual stories and it's just it has been a part of my life it is something that even when I got forced to join like a youth temple group and I got as a secretary I started turning the notes of the meetings into their own fantasies when I went to college I started writing to try and be a journalist and then in my mid-20s or early 20s mid-20s I was working in a newspaper in Mississippi going back and forth to New Orleans a couple times a week because some of the stuff I covered took place there. And I started trying to write a novel. And that kind of took me towards that world. And then I wasn't very good at it. And I wanted to learn learn more so I went to grad school for it and moved to New York and step by step I think was finding my way but the written word has always been a really interesting and important to me and and I think the the craft of making a good sentence

of telling a good story of telling someone else's story of trying to drill into what is true is some and while at the same time be entertaining and have a good joke now and then those are things that have always been interesting to me and so now you've written two novels you've written this personal memoir what do you hope people come away with when they read the book? Oh, I believe they will love my daughter quite a bit. I think anyone who is a parent will read this and recognize a lot of their own quest or their own relationships and their own feelings about parenting, even if mine are exaggerated and taken and I did them under an extreme circumstance. I also think it's a chance to sit and be with a young child and which for, I think for fathers, you know, Daddy Von Trapp hires Julie Andrews. Daddy Cinderella gets married and gets some step-parents. The idea of being a dad traditionally really is kind of like, especially a widower dad, find someone else to do it.

And certainly I had some help. I used what little money I had to have sitters, but I also showed up every day and any plans I had certainly blew up in my face and sometimes really spectacularly and, and entertainingly, but then I still showed up the next day. And I think that there's just a lot to be said for what your relationship with the people you care about can be by giving it your best, by showing up and doing what you can do in that moment. That's something I would take. Also that I'm so handsome and brilliant and such a great writer. If anyone wants to come away with that, please, please come. Come away with it. Yeah, I like the selling there at the end.

But no, one of the most important things that stories like yours do is there is other people there who go through similar circumstances. And finding out that someone else has gone through the same sort of cathartic moments to finding out that we're not alone is the real beauty of your story and i remember when i was writing my book and frustrated i had some authors that told me there's somebody out there who needs your book and they need to read your book and your story and and nothing's going to connect with them unless it's your story and and they said you need to write this book for whoever that is you may never meet them you never may never see

them you may never know them but they need your book so you've got to write this book and i was like wow that's really powerful in fact we had one guy on the show who she had a gal come up to her book signing she wrote a lot of novels and I think they were novels or nonfiction. I don't remember. But she wrote a lot of books. And this gal came up to her one time and said, I was in prison and we used your book in prison to inspire us and motivate us to be better

and to get out and not come back. And we had a reading crew in prison of women who would read your books and be inspired and now i'm trying to now i'm out of jail and i'm trying to be you know better with my with my choices in life and so she keeps a picture of that person when she writes now on her orange jumpsuit in the thing you know your ability to inspire people motivate them let them know they're not alone these are the great things about the stories that we share in life and how important they are and sometimes we we never really know how much we touch so uh we can't know the lives we're going to touch yeah but one thing that

one thing that's interesting that may be related may clash heads with it that i tell my students is this will never matter more to anyone than it does to you. If this is something you want to do, you owe it to yourself to take it seriously. You owe it to yourself to give you a real best effort to sit there, to fix things when there's problems, to learn, to be open. If this really matters to you, then it plays itself out on the page because you will show that. Then if you can communicate, if you can manage it on the page, then you have a chance of someone else understanding why this matters so much and feeling that in their own life so it's so i totally hear you but it's also true people who do want to write or who want to create like how seriously do you are you going to take your urge and you understand that because you

you do your podcast you write your funny guy like you have your your finger in a lot of pies you that takes that takes whatever it takes you know it just does yeah yeah you're inspiring people a great message for everybody a father and a daughter of course a beautiful story thank you very much for coming on the show, Charles. We really appreciate it. Oh, my gosh. Thank you for having me. You're very kind. And give us any dot-coms again for the plug.

I know that there's a Charles Bach at Squarespace, and it might just be Charles Bach. If you do a Google search Charles Bach website, it'll find it. Abrams Book, Amazon, The Strand, any indie bookseller. I Will Do Better is the name of my memoir. And I hope you will check it out and enjoy it. There's excerpts from The New Yorker tonight. As of now, The Wall Street Journal will have a piece in this weekend from it.

Newsweek next week. So there's some places where if people are interested, they can read and find out about it. I think it's a worthwhile tale, and it's not a long book either. So it's well-written and short. Thank you for having me, and thank you for listening to me. Thank you for coming, too. Name one of the best books of fall by Oprah Daly and people as well.

We should get that plug in there. Thank you very much for coming to the show, Charles. Thanks for tuning in. Go to wherever you find books are sold. I Will Do Better, a father's memoir of heartbreak, parenting, and love out October 1st, 2024. Thanks for tuning in.

Go to goodreads.com, fortuneschristmas, linkedin.com, fortuneschristmas, christmas1, the TikTok, all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other.

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