Charles Bock’s memoir I Will Do Better is a captivating account of grief and healing.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“In his distinctive prose style, both lyrical and muscular, Bock evokes a chaotic kaleidoscope of tones—irony, anger, literary ambition, fierce parental protectiveness, loneliness, toxic masculinity…A uniquely forthright and powerful addition to the literature of fatherhood.”
In his own words, here is Charles Bock’s Book Notes music playlist for his memoir I Will Do Better:
At the end of two plus years battling leukemia, my wife, Diana Colbert, passed three days before our daughter’s third birthday. My memoir, I Will Do Better, begins with my drive home from the hospital, lugging Diana’s belongings in a black plastic bag, and it covers the next two years. The characters? Broken mess me (forty-three, near financial ruin, awash in grief, artistically ambitious, socially selfish—a boy-man who had, so far, refused to grow up) and Lily, the little girl (innocent, blameless) for whom I had just become fully responsible.
Each night, once Lily and I put on her jammies and brushed our teeth, we retreated to the bedroom, got comfy under the comforter, and popped open the laptop to listen to music.
The events of my memoir took place ten years ago. One of the true joys of going through emails, digging through old phones for photos, and then writing I Will Do Better was that, in trying to come to terms with just what the hell had happened to me and Lily, in trying to make peace with not just who I was during that time, but also my multitude of wrong decisions and mistakes (made while attempting to play the shitty hand my daughter and I had been dealt), I got to keep that innocent toddler daughter, present, not just next to me, but pulling at my ear, snuggling into my side.
In tracking down the songs for this list — songs I listened to, sometimes with Lily, during these important years — I swear, it seemed as if we really were right back in that bed, taking part in our nightly ritual.
Honestly, even as I write this sentence, it still all feels so close, as if I could reach out and still put my arm around that little girl and hold her to me.
I guess, in so many ways, that’s what this list is doing.
Putting together this list, like John Prine singing I Remember Everything, works as an act of love.
“I Remember Everything,” John Prine. The last recorded song by one of our greatest songwriters, “I Remember Everything” acts as something of a memoirist’s coda. Prine sort of captures the memoirists’ job: you have to stare at the important moments of your life, dive deep into them, turning them over, re-examining them, speaking to your experience, while being clear eyed about what happened, just to those involved. A hope is that this will bring catharsis — to you, the writer, and to your reader — and maybe even a modicum of peace. The truth, though, is it doesn’t really matter what those memories do to the writer. You give yourself this job, you shoulder its responsibility.
“The Show,” Lenka. In the video, of “The Show,” indie pop-let Lenka starts out on a park bench holding a flower. She levitates, her body is jerked, charmingly by forces beyond her control. Puppet birds watch with her; when she rides her bike through hipster Los Angeles, puppet tomatoes sing along from the basket. Her voice is striking in its purity. The song’s hook is catchy and sing-songy and worms a hole in your brain: “I’m just a little girl/ caught in the middle/ life is a maze/ and love is a riddle.” (A simple stanza, some plinky synth in the background.) Lily and I watched this ridiculously affecting video almost nightly, via Youtube. I think Lily found comfort in the lyrics — I’m just a little girl caught in the moment, I’m so scared, but I can’t show it — which spoke for her. She’d sing along,imitating Lenka’s pronunciation of can’t as cawn’t. In the years to come, little old me, who certainly could relate to feeling cheated and confused —repeated some of the song’s last lines to myself, a lot, as a reminder, a motivational prompt: “I want my money back, I want my money back.” Lenka’s very last line: “Just enjoy the show.”
“One Two Three Four,” Feist on Sesame Street: Another joy during our evenings was sorting through the Sesame Street archives — from the gritty, blurred original skits of the early seventies, to more recent celebrity-dappled selections. One particular entry, always sure to please, involved Feist, a young singer with brown braided hair and a blue cotton blouse whose floral decorations revolved around its open collar. Appearing from behind a green door, Feist motions for us to follow, and, holding her hands primly behind her back, walks down the side of the street, cutting behind a blue mailbox. “One two three four,” she counts. “Monsters walking across the floor.” Sesame Street’s official version of the song —aping Feist’s real pop song of the same name — helps toddlers learn to count and has some 976 million views on Youtube. (The New York Times offers a deep dive into how it became a viral smash). Lily and I memorized all the lines and shouted them over one another. We had fun disagreeing on which puppets were funnier (penguins stacked up by the door vs chickens just back from the shore). The song builds to joyous, chaotic rapture, a screen full of puppets singing a gleeful chorus together while Feist sways and holds up the number. My favorite part actually comes after the music has ended, after Feist, alone on camera, has done her little bow. The camera, still rolling, captures her breaking into a smile— ecstatic; she can’t believe they got it right! Or how much fun it was! Some idiot cut that smile out of the official, billion-views version of the song, but this unintentionally honest tear in the seam can be seen here, at the 2:24-2:26 mark. Back in the day, it served as private inspiration for me, a secret signal: there has to be a way through.
“Perfect Night,” Sarah Silverman and Will.i.am. Lily and I had rule: we couldn’t go to sleep mad at one another. This added certain functions to bedtime. We read our story books, listened to our Beethoven piano concerto (which didn’t take with her) and to Madeline Kahn and Grover singing a song about echoes (which did), the idea being to defuse, to calm.
When she was calmed, and finally asleep—perhaps quivering with one of those kids’ nocturnal shockwaves—I’d ease my way out of the bed, tip toe back into my living room, looking to switch gears. What could I do with the rest of my evening? Heading out to the bodega wasn’t a consideration. Even going down to the basement to drop off trash was a risk. Stuck Alone Me might cue up a collab, the hip hop artist Wil.i.am with comedienne/goddess Sarah Silverman. “Perfect Night,” a catchy little club mix about how Sarah is actually not heading out to the club; but is preening in the light of the opened fridge. The opening lyric of each stanza was cute and relatable (She’s rocking sweat pants/ she’s watering them plants/ she’s ordering food/ she’s not in the mood/ for them pans).
They progressively got weirder, dirtier:
Almost ready for my beddy
Put some Palmers on my skin
Go to YouPorn on my iPhone
And I type my search words in
“Run to the Hills,” Iron Maiden. Alright! Now we’re getting somewhere! Pounding percussion sets the pace! A ruly filthy riff almost immediately joins: “White man came, across the sea, he brought us pain, and misery.” Adrenaline! The American/ Native American war, told from alternating points of views —the braves and then the cavalry! Lyrics and wailing provided by a native of the Queen’s England, a history nut with a PhD and a passion for flying. If this song were released today, Bruce Dickinson, Maiden’s lead singer, might be accused of appropriation. But it was released during the eighties, oh well. In high school hasher zones from coast to coast, what Dickinson did was considered badass, a statement about unfairness and being powerless to the whims of history and forces larger than yourself, a story of relating to otherness, and also a story of just wanting to fucking flee. When I had five minutes to myself, or maybe two hours of writing time, some teenaged part of my boy man psyche returned to this song, found solace in it, letting the metal wash over me, letting myself disappear, running away from my life.
This week, I asked Lily to come over to my computer, to listen to “Winter” by Tori Amos.
A teenager now, Lily is reluctant to do a lot of what I ask —and generally distrustful of anything I want to share with her. Even as the song began — a tinkle of piano, a woman’s voice, on key but maybe a little high on the register — Lily did not seem that interested.
As she listened, she became captivated.
“Winter” is a voice and a piano, nothing more. The viewpoint of a girl who becomes a young woman and then an adult, picking up with her at different points in the evolution. Time is important in this song; the girl sings about putting her hand in her father’s coat, about years going by, wanting her father — or maybe a boyfriend, definitely a male figure — to understand. At moments, she relays things her dad tells her, arguments he made. She joins a conversation between her young woman self and a boyfriend who is leaving her for a girl who “thinks really deep thoughts.” What’s so special about really deep thoughts, Tori tells him.
When Tori gives that second part of the answer— Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon, how’s that deep for you? — Lily was busy blurting a response to the previous line, and did not hear.
Tori continued, singing about finding her own voice, growing into the voice that has been buried deep inside, that has been silent all these years.
My daughter heard these lyrics, the refrain of the chorus. She went silent, still.
Tori has dedicated live versions of this song to her own father. In the song, she voices a conversation with him.
You say you always wanted
You to be proud of me
I always wanted that myself
I am in my mid-fifties now. Nine times out of ten, the daughter who was the little girl in the memoir does not want my opinions. We get locked in power struggles. I sometimes tell her that I am getting too old to physically handle all our housekeeping responsibilities, and she needs to pick up after herself. When I get sick or achy, I recognize the shock in her face. She’s admitted that she still sees me as a giant.
In the middle of arguments, I stop, shocked at how sharp and gorgeous and difficult she is. I never could have imagined that wide eyed toddler reaching this age. (And that’s some of the pleasure, right? How your influences manifest and reverse and create their own wondrous individual?)
A refrain at the end of the chorus of “Winter” applies to the father and the daughter: Things are going to change/ so fast/ all the white horses/ have gone ahead.
When the song ended the other day, both Lily and I had tears in our eyes. She asked for its name. She said, “I want to listen to that.”
also at Largehearted Boy:
Charles Bock’s playlist for his novel Alice & Oliver
Charles Bock is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Beautiful Children and Alice & Oliver, and a creative writing professor at New York University. The father of two daughters, he lives in New York City.