Body Drop
Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling
by Brian Oliu
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Pub Date Sep 28 2021 | Archive Date Sep 07 2021
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Description
Professional wrestling is a strange beast full of contradictions--part live soap opera, part hypermasculine violent spectacle. It is an indelibly American pastime enjoyed by millions and leads a select group of wrestlers to international fame. It’s also a sport that leaves many of its athletes broken and battered, at serious risk of addiction, poverty, and early death. Body Drop looks deeply at the nuances of professional wrestling and its strange place within American culture. Brian Oliu offers deeply personal meditations on such topics as disability, chronic pain, body image, masculinity, class, and more, all through the lens of American professional wrestling.
Wrestling is a sport that is gleefully fake, but the people who love it are very real. In holding up this particular part of American culture to scrutiny, Oliu acknowledges that the wrestling world, like our own, is one that has been crafted, but by showing readers the scaffolding that holds everything up, he invites us to figure out what holds our own realities straight.
Brian Oliu teaches, writes, and fights out of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is the author of three chapbooks and five full-length collections of nonfiction, including So You Know It’s Me.
Advance Praise
"What Oliu does here is much needed: he navigates through the messy and confusing layers of professional wrestling and life itself, all of it a play within a play within a play, and finds love and loss, faces and heels, the very stuff of what it means to be so confusingly and miraculously alive."--Jared Yates Sexton, author of American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People
"Brian Oliu's Body Drop places the reader in a cross-face chicken wing and demands they see pro wrestling as the insightful art form it truly is. A must-read for any fan."--Brian Box Brown, author of Andre the Giant: Life and Legend
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781469663418 |
| PRICE | $19.00 (USD) |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Dan O, Bookseller
My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher University of North Carolina Press for an advanced copy of this book on professional wrestling and so much more.
Brian Oliu in his book Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling, has created one of the most personal, oddest, informative and frankly beautiful and different books on professional wrestling that I have ever read. A mix of history, memoir, occupational, stream of consciousness writing as if the author spoke the words aloud in the midst of a fever dream. Or after taking a top rope splash to the concrete, and nobody there to stop the impact.
At once a history of the sport, well a modern history of the sport, full of terms and insider lingo with observations on historical highspots and matches, that the author was a fan of, combined with a memoir of growing up as a heavy child, and all the fun that could be. I was a heavy child too, so I understood this section, and the rage that he said he felt, but did not want to act on. Actions have consequences, as anyone watching wrestling can tell you. Mr. Oliu discusses body image, pain, trauma, mental and physical anguish, aspirations and reality with essays on the wrestlers, some never named and their travails in the rings, with his own life story. The book is truly different, in some parts so clear, in some you feel as if your head bounced on the mat, the air is gone from your lungs and you have to finish reading before the concussion gets worse, or the bell rings. I can't say enough.
If the reader has a history with WWE, WWF, WCW and since most of these wrestlers seem to be there now AEW it helps to make sense of some essays. You will appreciate the stories of the unnamed Harts or know who Jericho and Malenko are. However coming in to this book unknowing might be a great thing too. Like arriving in a new wrestling territory back in the day, and having only what you see in front of you to decide who to root for and who to boo. I really enjoyed this book, and look forward to reading it again. 6 stars on the Meltzer scale.
