The Hero’s Body

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.

Featured in The Telegraph here.

I really do hope to win this, he says. I really hope for them to understand that they could be men while loving literature and music and art, that real men are merciful, that real men are kind, that real men show love towards those who are weaker, not scorn ~ The Guardian.

I keep reading books on masculinity, and what the author usually says is that a lot of masculine culture is learned behaviour - nurture rather than nature. Well, maybe so. But it feels like there’s a lot of nature here underneath all the nurture. Something unprocessed and primal. That’s what I mean when I say it’s raw ~ The Spectator.