Six months after the death of his wife from leukaemia, novelist Charles Bock was reading Everybody Loves Our Town, a book detailing the history of grunge music, when one particular paragraph leapt out at him.
It was a comment by the girlfriend of singer Andy Wood, who was describing how she felt after his death, and the importance of her subsequent run of sexual partners.
Explaining that sex represented the essential human urge to live, she remarked that sex and grief were inevitably intertwined. And suddenly, Charles recalls , he realised something profound.
When I read it, what I really felt was: I need to have sex. He achieved his aim โ and then some โ as he describes in his brilliant memoir I Will Do Better. While, at its heart, the book details the first two years after the death of his wife Diana and the struggle to raise their three-year-old daughter Lily alone, Bock also speaks truthfully about a subject that remains deeply taboo: sexual grief.
So when I read that passage in the music book, it was like: hey, right. So Bock removed his wedding ring and waded into the world of online dating. Speaking from his apartment in Manhattan, which he shares with Lily, now 16, Charles is witty and engaging company.
