The Body Shop: Parties, Pills, and Pumping Iron - Or, My Life in the Age of Muscle

I got this book because the description sounded like something I would enjoy. I was completely shocked by how interesting this memoir is. It almost reads like fiction in some parts and Paul is a master with words.

I finished this book a few days ago and can't get it out of my head. A lurid phantasmagoria of dark slapstick, it is also a haunting account of familial sorrow. Our hero, an erstwhile skinny, shy bookworm who longs for a sex life as much as for the attention of his distant father, discovers the transformative powers of body building and steroids as a 20-year-old college student. Turning girls' heads turns his head away from the high literary tradition of his dysfunctional family, or so he thinks. No matter how far he falls into the juice-pumped cesspool that was the New York sex-and-drug scene in the Seventies, his thoughts are never far from his deeply disapproving father. The writing is manic and brilliant. The descriptions of bad judgement, bad behavior, and bad clothes are priceless.

Body Shop had me laughing til it hurt - but at least I was exercising my abs at the same time. Written with great humor and wit, this book is a must read for anyone who lived through this era or ever head about it. It is a sexy and yet poignant portrayal of a young man's search for himself and a connection with his absent father.