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 two generations of men from the working-class town of Manville, New Jersey, including Giraldi's own adolescent forays into obsessive bodybuilding as a teenager desperate to be worthy of his family's pitiless, exacting codes of manhood.