The Hero's Body: A Memoir

by William Giraldi

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631492938
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/01/2017
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

William Giraldi is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark; the memoir The Hero’s Body; and a collection of criticism, American Audacity. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is master lecturer in the Writing Program at Boston University.

Editorial Reviews

"A wise and thoughtful personal narrative as well as an illuminating portrait of a seductive, if hazardous, American subculture. . . . The Hero’s Body itself captures a merging of hard experience and literary aspiration. In this gathering of memories, a gifted writer has certainly found the right words."

Wall Street Journal - Gordon Marino

"Giraldi writes with subtlety about the unsubtle world of clanging metal, exploring with frank tenderness the ways men form friendships and how those friendships can grow into love. The Hero’s Body is suffused with platonic masculine love, the love of weight lifting buddies and motorcycles and the men who ride them, in particular the author’s doomed father. . . . Giraldi has written a powerful and sympathetic accounting of the lengths men will go to discover themselves through the workings of their fragile and complicated bodies, and the ways they discover hidden strength."

New York Times Book Review - Michael Ian Black

Giraldi writes with subtlety about the unsubtle world of clanging metal, exploring with frank tenderness the ways men form friendships and how those friendships can grow into love. The Hero's Body is suffused with platonic masculine love, the love of weight lifting buddies and motorcycles and the men who ride them, in particular the author's doomed father…Giraldi has written a powerful and sympathetic accounting of the lengths men will go to discover themselves through the workings of their fragile and complicated bodies, and the ways they discover hidden strength.

The New York Times Book Review - Michael Ian Black

05/16/2016
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. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

"Giraldi writes with subtlety about the unsubtle world of clanging metal, exploring with frank tenderness the ways men form friendships and how those friendships can grow into love. The Hero’s Body is suffused with platonic masculine love, the love of weight lifting buddies and motorcycles and the men who ride them, in particular the author’s doomed father. . . . Giraldi has written a powerful and sympathetic accounting of the lengths men will go to discover themselves through the workings of their fragile and complicated bodies, and the ways they discover hidden strength."

Michael Ian Black

06/15/2016
Giraldi has written a powerful memoir that examines the masculine in great detail. Born in the small, blue-collar town of Manville, NJ, to a family of carpenters, gym rats (except his father), and motorcycle fanatics, Giraldi dedicates the first half of the book to his youth and brief foray into bodybuilding, presenting a fascinating account of competitive bodybuilding. Later chapters offer a close examination of how and why the men in his family loved motorcycles—and incredible speed. The author recounts his father's death in a horrific motorcycle accident at age 47. Most admirable is Giraldi's love of literature that was not shared by anyone else in his family or circle of friends. Throughout this work he continuously astonishes with his highly intelligent verse, apt quotations from literary giants, and creative wording of concepts that are often difficult to convey. VERDICT This highly recommended book is for anyone who wishes to better understand the male ego, the desire for sheer masculinity, and the need for speed.—Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI

Library Journal

★ 2016-05-08
A loving son reflects on life with a brawny father whose premature death permanently transformed him. AGNI fiction editor and New Republic contributing writer Giraldi (Hold the Dark, 2014, etc.) paints himself as an "earnestly unjockish" adolescent who looked up to his muscular father for direction, advice, and as the ultimate example of raw masculinity. Raised solely by his father in working-class, blue-collar Manville, New Jersey, the author writes earnestly about his closet affinity for classic literature and mounting frustration at his inability to measure up to his father's macho image. Craving the "sacral creed" of masculinity that seemed to power the town (and his male-dominated family), a spontaneous visit to his uncle Tony's makeshift workout room drastically altered his perspective, priorities, and physique. He eventually joined the hard-core training circuit culture at the Physical Edge gym, the local "sanctum of the gargantuan." Bodybuilding became an "obsession that included brutalizing workouts, steroids, competitions, an absolute revamping of the self." Thankfully, this hardened intensity doesn't strip Giraldi's memoir of its personality. His adventures with body shaving, maddening diet regimens, the "fetishizing pleasure" of hoarding steroids, and bodybuilding competitions all provide moments of wry humor and steely determination. His interest in bodybuilding deflated once the gym closed its doors and the author's father sold the family home to move in with a girlfriend. Giraldi poignantly ponders his father as a man morphing through the decades from a levelheaded, reliable family man to a "harebrained...high-stakes gambler" and a devotee of treacherous motorcycle racing. His father experienced many nonfatal crashes, but one would take his life in 2000 at 47. The details of his tragedy become blurred with accusations and unsettled with inconclusiveness from an anterior-mounted camera inexplicably vanishing from the scene of the accident. Giraldi provides a respectful homage to his father, who died "attempting to be worthy of an ancient code," but he also pays tribute to the working-class male and the unspoken codes of machismo. A hearty, bittersweet familial chronicle of masculinity drawing on the underappreciated bond between fathers and sons.

Kirkus Reviews