Dirty South

Hageman's real skill is the joke that arrives with a limp already built in. "I arrived with a leap of faith to dismantle my spine in installments" sets the register on page one and he never drops it: William the Conqueror gets a crown, Hageman gets "a forty-year suspended sentence" from his own vertebrae. That conceit — the spine as a patient, methodical assailant handing down sentences it will collect on decades later — is the book's actual structural spine (sorry), and it's a genuinely clever organizing device for a memoir that otherwise sprawls across cricket pitches, hotel kitchens, golf clubs, and Albuquerque bedrooms.

The voice is dry, self-mocking, and specific rather than generically wry — he doesn't just say the hospital food was bad, he gives you "grey mush that claimed to be shepherd's pie" and the diagnosis that "you come in for a broken back, you stay for the malnutrition." The Diazepam discography scene in Chapter Two is the book's high point: the tension between his bravado ("I had a history with pain") and the doctor's flat, unbothered professionalism ("Her face didn't change; not even a flicker") plays as both comedy and a small, honest confession about what pain actually does to a person's mouth and dignity.

What holds it back from a higher ceiling is that the jokes sometimes do the emotional work the narrative should be doing — Gran's intervention and the wedding-day beach carry are genuinely tender beats that get walked past quickly on the way to the next punchline. But for a reader who wants the black comedy of a body falling apart narrated by someone who refuses to be solemn about it, this delivers exactly what it promises, chapter after chapter.