Vendor
	Foundry Claire Harris
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

THE HERO'S BODY

William Giraldi

A Memoir

A memoir of motorcycles and muscles, of obsession and grief, and of a young man who learned how to stay alive through literature. 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.
William Giraldi is the author of the critically hailed novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and the memoir, The Hero's Body. He is fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.

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.

William Giraldi is the author of the critically hailed novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and the memoir, The Hero's Body. He is fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.

Available products
Book Published 2016-08-09 by Liveright
Book Published 2016-08-09 by Liveright

Comments

The Hero's Body provides profound insight into the world of men, their obsessions, their compulsions, their extreme vulnerabilities. This is a beautiful book about bodies that go beyond beauty and into the macabre. Giraldi writes prose that singes as it sings, that never falters in its riveting narrative about strength and speed and grief. I love this book and feel wiser for having read it.

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.

Magnificent and superbly told...The Hero's Body is a living, throbbing, visceral model of what a memoir should be. You simply never want Giraldi's voice to go away.

Part Virgil, part Vesalius, William Giraldi tenders, in The Hero’s Body, a bookish man’s contemplation of the epic and catholic incarnations of the manly arts—the heart-wracked, large muscle, high speed, action-figured, sacrificial mysteries of body and of blood. For men who want to know how they came to be the ones they are, and for women who abide them: a serious, sinewy, humanizing read.

At just 288 pages, The Hero's Body is an epic, the heavyweight champion of this indiscreet genre. Reckless calisthenics, untimely death, saddening masculinity--these might not seem the ingredients for the Great American Memoir. Until you realize: of course they are. This is America. This is the Land of Violence and Sadness and the Unlikely Happy Ending. And this is the perfect book.

[Giraldi] depicts not only life-shifting grief but a pervasive culture of hypermasculinity in his family and in his working-class New Jersey town.