Hero's Body

The Hero's Body is a memoir of what it means to be a man in modern America. At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldi's father was killed in a horrific motorcycle accident. Writing here with searing honesty about grief, obsession, shame and identity, he looks back on three generations of men from the blue-collar town of Manville, New Jersey, and tells their stories in tandem: the speed-crazed cult of his father's 'superbikes', each Sunday spent racing fate along the winding back roads of Pennsylvania; the trauma of a son's ultimate loss, and William's attempts to rebuild a self in the manliest costume he knew. For a teen consumed by hardcore bodybuilding, pumping iron was so much more than a sport-it was a hallowed lifeline for a bookish tenth-grader, a way to forge himself a spot amongst his family's imperious patriarchs. A work of lasting literary beauty, lauded by the New Yorker for its 'unrelenting, perfectly paced prose', The Hero's Body is a tale of the working-class male, the codes of machismo and the unspoken bond between father and son.

Is this the best book I've ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is, While many of the ideas he raises are universal, The Hero's Body is a somewhat turbocharged, uniquely American take on what it means to be male, I've never read anything like this. Superbly written, A powerful autobiographical memoir, an absorbing memoir [...] Giraldi urges us to put aside our preconceptions and appreciate bodybuilding as an aesthetic pursuit, and the bodybuilder as a kind of 'walking poetry': in his narcissistic perfectionism and emphasis on balance, proportion, rhythm and harmony, he is not unlike the ballerino.

William Giraldi grew up in Manville, New Jersey, and attended college at Drew University and Boston University. He is author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. He's been granted fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Oxford American, The New York Times, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Baffler, Ploughshares, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and online at The Daily Beast and Salon. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.