The Hero's Body: A Memoir
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A memoir of motorcycles and muscles, of obsession and grief, and of a young man who learned how to stay alive through literature.
At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldi’s father was killed in a horrific motorcycle crash while racing on a country road. This tragedy, which forever altered the young Giraldi and devastated his family, provides the pulse for The Hero’s Body. In the tradition of Andre Dubus III’s Townie, this is a deep-seeing investigation into two generations of men from the working-class town of Manville, New Jersey, including Giraldi’s own forays into obsessive bodybuilding as a teenager desperate to be worthy of his family’s pitiless, exacting codes of manhood. Lauded by The New Yorker for his “unrelenting, perfectly paced prose,” Giraldi writes here with daring, searing honesty about the fragility and might of the American male. An unflinching memoir of luminous sorrow, a son’s tale of a lost father and the ancient family strictures of extreme masculinity, The Hero’s Body is a work of lasting beauty by one of our most fearless writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this gripping meditation on men and death, AGNI editor Giraldi confronts the demands of masculinity that propelled him into extreme bodybuilding and led to his father's fatal motorcycle accident. Abandoned by his mother at age 10, Giraldi struggled to find a place in his blue-collar family until, after being debilitated by meningitis and dumped by his girlfriend for a high-school jock, he started lifting weights. Transforming his physique through pumping iron and using steroids gave Giraldi confidence, a community, and respect. The same passion for risk and need for patriarchal approval led his carpenter father to illegally race high-powered motorcycles on Pennsylvania back roads, with tragic results. Giraldi's lucid, vibrant prose illuminates the generally unvoiced codes that determine so much male behavior. In the book's flawless first half, he vividly evokes life in a central New Jersey township during the Reagan-Bush era, the tense dynamics of a domestic circle dominated by his taciturn grandfather, and the allure and destructiveness of bodybuilding. Grappling with his father's death, however, proves more difficult. Giraldi obsessively scrutinizes the accident as he traces its reverberations across his family, but his father remains opaque. Nevertheless, his narrative provides remarkable insight into the often-stereotyped world of bodybuilding.
