The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire #42: Charles Bock
"I tried to render the truth while also paying attention to what a book has to do to be a good reading experience. This in some cases does mean some retrofitting."
Since 2010, in various publications, I’ve interviewed authors—mostly memoirists—about aspects of writing and publishing. Initially I did this for my own edification, as someone who was struggling to find the courage and support to write and publish my memoir. I’m still curious about other authors’ experiences, and I know many of you are, too. So, inspired by the popularity of The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire, I’ve launched The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.
Here’s the 42nd installment, featuring Charles Bock, author most recently of I Will Do Better: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love. -Sari Botton
Charles Bock is the author of the new memoir I WILL DO BETTER: A Father’s Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love, as well as the novels ALICE & OLIVER and BEAUTIFUL CHILDREN, which was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book, and which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His fiction and nonfiction are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Slate, as well as in numerous anthologies. He teaches at NYU and lives with his daughter in New York City. His website, piddling though it may be, is charlesbock.net
—
How old are you, and for how long have you been writing?
I am — holy hell how did this happen — double nickels, 55. When I was 5 or 6 I loved MAD and Cracked and even remember doing stand-up at a first grade talent show. I started really trying to write when I was 12, or 13, thereabouts, making up comic books and superhero stories. When I was 13, my parents forced me and my brothers go to a teen religious group. At some point I was appointed secretary, and started using the public reading of the previous week’s notes as an excuse, turning parliamentary notes into crazy adventure stories.
What’s the title of your latest book, and when was it published?
I WILL DO BETTER is being published today, Oct 1, 2024.
What number book is this for you?
Book three. I published two novels before this.
How do you categorize your book—as a memoir, memoir-in-essays, essay collection, creative nonfiction, graphic memoir, autofiction—and why?
It is a memoir. It uses facts and events, which also get synthesized and condensed and all kinds of creative stuff, for the purpose of recreating a specific tale, the story of what happened to us. I think nowadays this fits under the umbrella of memoir.
What is the “elevator pitch” for your book?
Our daughter was six months old when my wife, Diana, was diagnosed with advanced leukemia. Diana passed three days before Lily’s third birthday, meaning I was forty-whatever years old, alone, grieving, broke, and 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 that I promised myself, however many times a day, a phrase every parent recognizes. This is a love story and a fairy tale (the best of each take you to an edge). It’s 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 and manhood. The story of a little girl and her daddy.
Our daughter was six months old when my wife, Diana, was diagnosed with advanced leukemia. Diana passed three days before Lily’s third birthday, meaning I was forty-whatever years old, alone, grieving, broke, and 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.
What’s the back story of this book including your origin story as a writer? How did you become a writer, and how did this book come to be?
Honestly, raising and taking care of Lily has been the priority of my adult life. These two years were pressure-filled. I was so full of fear, so unsure of how we would survive. I also look back on them and wish we were still there; I feel like I could still reach out and hold that young girl to me. It felt like time to look back on this time, to try and make sense of it, to unpack it, and do justice to it, and that wonderful little human.
What were the hardest aspects of writing this book and getting it published?
In terms of writing the book, I honestly thought that because I’d written complex fiction, and had a sense of the arc of what this memoir could be, I could write it pretty fast. I learned, once again, how hard it is to find the right language and voice for each project. I really went through a lot before the language clicked for me, allowing the book to coalesce. I also had to experience firsthand something the wonderful memoirist Howard Axelrod told me, which is that there is a difference between the narrator “you” speaking to the reader, and what that narrator understands, and the actual character “you” going through the experience portrayed in the book. Your memoir has at least two you characters in it, and they have different voices and purposes, and fully understanding what this meant was a big technical issue for me.
Meanwhile, writing is not the same thing as swinging a pickaxe in the frozen wiles of Siberia; it’s not physically destructive, but it’s mentally a lot. You always want to be done, you want whatever draft to be the right draft, want validation, rewards, parades, or at least to be able to pay the rent. But your rewards are often internal, involving matching yourself with craft and language and emotion, watching ideas — and sentences, and scenes — evolve. It has to be personal, involving that relationship with craft and art.
But then yes, at a certain point you try and turn it into commerce, which just wholly sucks. I don’t really like talking about the publishing end of it. Suffice to say, we all live in this wireless crypto social media environ; meanwhile books and publishing are basically 19th century agrarian farming.
I do feel lucky that I have excellent representation, and we found a wonderful publishing house and team. I can say that.
How did you handle writing about real people in your life? Did you use real or changed names and identifying details? Did you run passages or the whole book by people who appear in the narrative? Did you make changes they requested?
I changed names. I changed identifying details. I condensed and merged and created composites. I wrote fiction! No! I did not! But I tried to render the truth while also paying attention to what a book has to do to be a good reading experience. This in some cases does mean some retrofitting. I can look at any passage in the book and annotate any part, telling you, this happened and this happened and this happened, and I used them all together to convey X, which I feel is properly representative. That is something I think is artistically responsible and morally acceptable while working in this form.
I also tried, always, to be more sympathetic to the people I was writing about than to myself. I didn’t want scapegoats. I similarly tried to respect the emotional weight of important moments from the book — moments which affected how people dealt with and saw one another. I tried to write with a sense of how the characters on the other side of an event might have seen things/me. I wouldn’t want anybody in this memoir feeling cheated or exploited or misrepresented.
And of course I very much made a priority to try to portray the full complexity and awesomeness of my young daughter during these years. That was a lot of fun. Trying to get her right was a big deal.
The title is a phrase that I promised myself, however many times a day, a phrase every parent recognizes. This is a love story and a fairy tale (the best of each take you to an edge). It’s 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 and manhood. The story of a little girl and her daddy.
Who is another writer you took inspiration from in producing this book? Was it a specific book, or their whole body of work? (Can be more than one writer or book.)
Okay, this is going to be weird and discursive, sorry.
One book I thought about while I wrote was The Curious Case of the Dog and the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon. It is a book I teach, a complex winding tale, told by a character on the spectrum, who has limited connection with his emotional life, and also is a math genius.
It is impossible to put down. The pages turn like eating potato chips.
I wanted that for this memoir.
So I read a lot of books like that. I went back into the manuscript of The Princess Bride, for instance.
I re-read Helen DeWitt’s brilliant The Seventh Samurai, which is one of the wildest pieces of writing ever, but also, again, totally impossible to put down.
Also, I often thought of something James Ellroy said about the writing of The Cool Six Thousand, which a big sprawling book about the JFK assassination. He tried to burn the language down to its essence. He wanted nothing extra. He wanted the sentences to race like quicksilver, but be concrete at the same time.
I wanted the sensitivity of parenthood, and the impossibility of life, and my emotional journey, and my amazing confounding child, and the tragedy of grief, and humor of a toddler shouting daddy daddy look at me and promptly faceplanting, and the realities of getting older, and the city in its go go go moneying transformation …
Everything had to be paced right and done justice to, and the reader needed to be invested, and it couldn’t be too long (it’s just over 200 pages).
What advice would you give to aspiring writers looking to publish a book like yours, who are maybe afraid, or intimidated by the process?
The time is going to pass. How are you going to spend it? If you are afraid or intimidated about the process, that is okay. But if you don’t try, you know what happens. The answer is right there. But what happens if you start the journey? What happens if you try to write two good sentences a day?
What do you love about writing?
I like being engaged with a sentence, a paragraph, a passage.
What frustrates you about writing?
Doing it well costs a lot emotionally. It creates mental distance. There is a price. Are there enough readers to justify the price? Is there enough monetary reward to justify it? How much squeeze to get how much juice?
What about writing surprises you?
What is amazing to me is how often the answers to my writing questions are not complex, but go back to the most fundamental elements. We search for complexity in stories, for the inner human contradictions and the layers of society and all that. But the way to achieve these complexities, usually for me, ends up involving basic, brick by brick construction, sentence building, specific word choices, etc.
Does your writing practice involve any kind of routine or writing at specific times?
I wish.
I had to experience firsthand something the wonderful memoirist Howard Axelrod told me, which is that there is a difference between the narrator “you” speaking to the reader, and what that narrator understands, and the actual character “you” going through the experience portrayed in the book. Your memoir has at least two you characters in it, and they have different voices and purposes, and fully understanding what this meant was a big technical issue for me.
Do you engage in any other creative pursuits, professionally or for fun? Are there non-writing activities do you consider to be “writing” or supportive of your process?
I draw and trace and sketch — often taken from my fave rock poster artists, but also from vintage advertisements, transferring them from my laptop onto colored construction paper. I’ll change the sketches and alter images. Then I fill them in with markers and crayons and whatnot. I put one into my daughter’s lunchbox when she goes off to Pre-K or a day camp. I have her two nights a week, so I do this twice a week. I’ve been doing it for two school years now and also through her summer and day camps. All of her friends look forward to my freaky insane lunch notes and agree I am a real good drawer. I’ve done somewhere between one and two hundred by now.
What’s next for you? Do you have another book planned, or in the works?
I have started a few projects. It is up in the air as to what takes.
Beautiful. I especially love the line about "retrofitting" as a way to describe how we tell our stories. It's perfect.
Sari, thank you for this interview. Your work is a handhold in the dark. I appreciate Charles' thoughts on injecting urgency, a la The Curious Incident, into writing. So helpful. Best of all, your interviews have a specificity and intimacy that makes me want to write, which is what I'm looking for.