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 an investigation into three 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 finest writers.

'One of the best memoirs I’ve read in years' - Financial Times

'Must reading, and not just for men' - Richard Russo

'A hearty, bittersweet familial chronicle of masculinity drawing on the underappreciated bond between fathers and sons'- Kirkus Reviews

'The Hero’s Body offers a wise and thoughtful personal narrative as well as an illuminating portrait of a seductive, if hazardous, American subculture...' - Wall Street Journal

'William Giraldi’s memoir . . . offers a brilliant anthropological excursion into a world few of us will ever penetrate . . . To an urban reader used to bookstores and cocktail parties, Giraldi’s Manville, N.J., is as exotic as the Kalahari. . . . Perceptive and eloquent' - Washington Post