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. 4 photographs"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
William Giraldi is the author of the of the memoir The Hero’s Body, and critically hailed novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, which is soon to be a major motion picture from Netflix. He is fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.
“Giraldi writes with subtlety about the unsubtle world of clanging metal, exploring with frank tenderness the ways men form friendships and how those friendships can grow into love. The Hero’s Body is suffused with platonic masculine love, the love of weight lifting buddies and motorcycles and the men who ride them, in particular the author’s doomed father. . . . Giraldi has written a powerful and sympathetic accounting of the lengths men will go to discover themselves through the workings of their fragile and complicated bodies, and the ways they discover hidden strength.”
- Michael Ian Black, New York Times Book Review
“A wise and thoughtful personal narrative as well as an illuminating portrait of a seductive, if hazardous, American subculture. . . . The Hero’s Body itself captures a merging of hard experience and literary aspiration. In this gathering of memories, a gifted writer has certainly found the right words.”
- Gordon Marino, Wall Street Journal
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Paperback. Condition: Very Good. 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. The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR008537630
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