The 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.

• A gripping meditation on what it means to ‘be a man’; Giraldi proves a vital and captivating voice in increasingly prominent conversations about gender identity in the 21st century, resonant of the annual ‘Being a Man’ festival at the Southbank Centre and Grayson Perry’s recently released The Descent of Man
• Explores themes of obsession, grief and loss which would resonate with readers of William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days, Oliver Sacks’ On the Move and Cathy Rentzenbrink’s The Last Act of Love
• Looks back on three generations of men from Manville, New Jersey where the ‘palpable blue-collar setting plunges you right into the world of a Bruce Springsteen ballad’
• William Giraldi has previously authored two critically acclaimed novels, Hold the Dark and Busy Monsters
• Hold the Dark TV adaptation currently in production with Netflix
• ‘One of the best memoirs I’ve read in years’ – Financial Times