
I Will Do Better
A Father's Memoir of Heartbreak, Parenting, and Love
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Narrated by:
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Charles Bock
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By:
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Charles Bock
About this listen
An acclaimed writer’s frank and tender memoir of parenting his toddler daughter in the wake of his wife’s untimely death
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 a 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 his 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 crippling citywide 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 this plucky child became, foremost, a duo—they found their way together.
By turns comical and heartbreaking, I Will Do Better does not shy from moments of sadness, anger, or awkwardness. It’s the remarkable journey of two defiant and wounded people, and their personal growth in the name of love.
"A uniquely forthright and powerful addition to the literature of fatherhood."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.
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Felt too self indulgent - even for a memoir
- By Kristin H on 09-27-24
By: Leslie Jamison
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Did I Ever Tell You?
- A Memoir
- By: Genevieve Kingston
- Narrated by: Genevieve Kingston
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Genevieve (Gwen) Kingston was just eleven years old when her mother passed away, leaving behind a chest filled with gifts and letters to celebrate the milestones of Gwen’s life and each of her birthdays until age thirty.
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Beautiful
- By Paloma M. Lee on 05-25-24
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The Freaks Came Out to Write
- The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture
- By: Tricia Romano
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller, Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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You either were there or you wanted to be. A defining New York City institution co-founded by Norman Mailer, The Village Voice was the first newspaper to cover hip-hop, the avant-garde art scene, and Off-Broadway with gravitas. It reported on the AIDS crisis with urgency and seriousness when other papers dismissed it as a gay disease. In 1979, the Voice’s Wayne Barrett uncovered Donald Trump as a corrupt con artist before anyone else was paying attention.
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Excellent content and structure, but …
- By richard s. burker on 03-16-24
By: Tricia Romano
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Consent
- A Memoir
- By: Jill Ciment
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens
- Length: 4 hrs
- Unabridged
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In this close-up look at the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven and married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1990s memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth when she wrote about their passion back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love.
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Excellent writing; overworked main question
- By Eric A. Ruthford on 06-18-24
By: Jill Ciment
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Do Something
- Coming of Age Amid the Glitter and Doom of '70s New York
- By: Guy Trebay
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’’ But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic, con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy.
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Heartache and heartbreak and the will to survive.
- By Polly B. on 07-05-24
By: Guy Trebay
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Liars
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Manguso
- Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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When Jane, an aspiring writer, meets filmmaker John Bridges, they both want the same things: to be in love, to live a successful, creative life, and to be happy. When they marry, Jane believes she has found everything she was looking for, including—a few years later—all the attendant joys and labors of motherhood. But it’s not long until Jane finds herself subsumed by John’s ambitions, whims, and ego; in short, she becomes a wife.
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Beautiful
- By Heather Demeter on 08-05-24
By: Sarah Manguso
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An Honest Woman
- A Memoir of Love and Sex Work
- By: Charlotte Shane
- Narrated by: Caitlin Kelly
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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In her early twenties, Charlotte Shane quit her women’s studies graduate program to devote herself to sex work because it was a way to devote herself to men. Her lifelong curiosity about male lust, love, selfishness, and social capital dovetailed with her own insatiable desire for intimacy to sustain a long career in escorting, with unexpectedly poignant results. Shane uses her personal and professional history to examine how men and women struggle in their attempts at romantic and sexual bonding, no matter how true their intentions.
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A complete waste of time!
- By McNeil on 09-04-24
By: Charlotte Shane
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Health and Safety
- A Breakdown
- By: Emily Witt
- Narrated by: Emily Witt
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 2016, a divisive presidential election was underway, and a new breed of right-wing rage was on the rise. Emily Witt, who would soon publish her first book on sex in the digital age, had recently quit antidepressants for a more expansive world of psychedelic experimentation. From her apartment in Brooklyn, she began to catch glimpses of the clandestine nightlife scene thrumming around her.
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Bored voice
- By Amazon Customer on 12-20-24
By: Emily Witt
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The Secret War of Julia Child
- A Novel
- By: Diana R. Chambers
- Narrated by: Candace Joice
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Before she mastered the art of French cooking in midlife, Julia Child found herself working in the secrets trade in Asia during World War II. Single, six foot two, and thirty years old, Julia McWilliams took a job working for America's first espionage agency, years before cooking or Paris entered the picture. The Secret War of Julia Child traces Julia's transformation from ambitious Pasadena blue blood to Washington, DC file clerk, to head of General "Wild Bill" Donovan's secret File Registry as part of the Office of Strategic Services.
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Julia Child, more amazing than ever
- By DQmaine on 11-14-24
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Stolen Pride
- Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right
- By: Arlie Russell Hochschild
- Narrated by: Ellen Archer
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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For all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we've ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel "stolen"? Hochschild's research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation.
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interesting conversations
- By Mark on 03-15-25
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I Heard Her Call My Name
- A Memoir of Transition
- By: Lucy Sante
- Narrated by: Lucy Sante
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life was a performance. She was presenting a facade, even to herself.
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I'm so glad I read this book
- By Judy in Salt Lake on 03-09-25
By: Lucy Sante
What listeners say about I Will Do Better
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Leesavee
- 10-21-24
Heartbreaking and heartwarming
This is simply one of the best books I have experienced. I was with Charles and Lily during the most difficult times of their lives as father and daughter, and I cried with them and cheered for them. And I mourned with them. Charles Bock is a deeply honest narrator of his and Lily’s experiences and it was an honor to be let in to the upheaval his wife’s tragic passing caused in both of their lives. Mr. Bock, if you ever read this review: you did do better. You did not break your child. You are so brutally honest with explaining your emotional state and your thoughts that I was sometimes aghast and other times moved to tears. This is an incredible book. Thank you, Charles and Lily Bock, for sharing it.
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