The Hero's Body by William Giraldi
The Hero’s Body, a book in part about the motorcycle crash that killed Giraldi’s father. It’s actually two books in one, labeled that way within its pages—practically a perfect split. Before detailing the crash and its aftermath, Giraldi first tells of his teenage bodybuilding.
I spent years of my adulthood poring over the documents related to my father’s death by car crash—news articles and photographs, police reports, his death certificate and autopsy. I have files of this stuff, and much more, in boxes above my wife’s closet. I’ve met the man who killed my father, once in 2008, at his back fence in Marion County, Florida, where, barring the eighteen months he spent in prison, he’d lived his whole life, and again in 2013, after chasing him into the woods by his house. All this settled nothing. I know the aimlessness of grief. So does William Giraldi.
The Hero’s