The Heros Body

Author: Giraldi, William

Memoirs

Published on 23 August 2017 by Bedford Square Publishers (No Exit Press) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 320 pages
130 x 198 x 20 | 232g

The Heros Body is a memoir of what it means to be a man in modern America.

At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldis 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 fathers superbikes, each Sunday spent racing fate along the winding back roads of Pennsylvania; the trauma of a sons ultimate loss, and Williams 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 familys imperious patriarchs.

A work of lasting literary beauty, lauded by the New Yorker for its unrelenting, perfectly paced prose, The Heros Body is a tale of the working-class male, the codes of machismo and the unspoken bond between father and son.