In 1998, I watched Mark Calaway hurl Mick Foley from the roof of a 16-foot-high cage. It was the World Wrestling Federation’s third ever ‘Hell in a Cell’ match, which usually sees wrestlers locked inside a steel cage slotted over a ring. Foley (stage name Mankind) and Calaway (The Undertaker) dreamt up something different: they would climb onto the roof and, after a precarious exchange of blows, the villainous Undertaker would chuck Mankind off in a flash of rage.

No matter how much you prepare, a 16-foot drop is a 16-foot drop. Foley nearly abandoned the plan when he saw how far he would fall. The stares of 15,000 fans waiting in anticipation made the decision for him. Under his breath, Foley told Calaway to commit to the throw, which he promptly did. Foley crashed through a commentator’s table and collided with the concrete floor below. Based on their stunned expressions, it seemed none of the referees, medical team or announcers were in on the script.

The match is so famous that I don’t actually remember whether I watched it live, but it is lodged in my memory. Every weekend, wrestling highlights were broadcast from America and every Monday my friends and I would discuss the antics of our favourite performers. We were under no illusion that it was real, but as a desperately unsporty child sent to all-male schools where athleticism was deeply prized, sharing a passion for the WWF (now WWE) was a significant opportunity for bonding with my peers. I’ve no doubt that if you believe these are real men acting as men should, it can be very psychologically damaging (confirmed not least by ongoing revelations about the deplorable behaviour of the former head of WWE, Vince McMahon). While I left the weekly ritual of watching wrestling behind in my early teens, I am sure it played a part in my understanding of the different kinds of manliness abroad in society and which were tolerable beyond the edges of a television screen.

Though we lived through countless famous and infamous wrestling events during the late nineties and early noughts, nothing ever topped the ‘98 Hell in a Cell. Foley and Calaway were dedicated to their roles, even when Calaway feared he’d killed his friend. This commitment to performance is known as ‘kayfabe’: the unwritten rules followed by wrestlers to present scripted matches and inter-personal rivalries as though they are real. The term is carnival slang from when it was common to fix wrestling bouts. To keep disgruntled audiences onside, competitors concocted dramatic personas with in-ring conflicts that quickly took centre stage. When punters were nearby, ‘kayfabe’ was the code to get into character. Gradually, these circus matches evolved into modern pro wrestling: athletic theatre that combines choreographed stunts, improvisation and melodrama, performed as authentic competitions in Colosseum-like stadiums.

Consider my delight, then, when Wes Brown’s Breaking Kayfabe (2023) came through my post-box. I found in its pages Brown’s own account of a childhood spent in the company of Mankind, The Undertaker and other wrestling superstars. Breaking Kayfabe is a genre-bending novel-memoir about masculinity, family and identity based on Brown’s attempt to break into the world of British professional wrestling, overshadowed by his father who wrestled to minor fame in the sixties as ‘Sailor’ Earl Black. This is the scaffolding of truth that surrounds the book, which may or may not be pages of kayfabe. It centres on a character called Wes Brown, but where author and character overlap is hard to tell. ‘You can always rely on a pro wrestler to be an unreliable narrator,’ Brown said wryly in an interview.

The plot springs from Wes’s attempt to find meaning after imposter syndrome derails his literary career. ‘I appeared at literary festivals and bookstores, dressed up like an author, hair side-parted, and sounding like one with all the correct portentousness and writerly import to my voice, but I knew inside I was a coward, an imposter, and hated myself.’ Following a disaster with book proofs and the onset of writer’s block, he turns to drugs and alcohol, spiralling into despair and loneliness. Eventually, he decides to act on his life-long love of wrestling, born from both his dad’s career and the televised wrestling he watched as a child. He joins a dojo and comes up with Earl Black Jr, a wrestler battling his father’s legacy. Contrary to his instincts, Wes soon embraces a villain persona, the ‘heel’ in wrestling jargon, whose goal was to make life difficult for the heroes, the ‘babyfaces.’ The character is the anti-Wes, ‘a Strong Style wrestler from Yorkshire who is very aggressive and outraged by Renegade woke politics. Total reactionary bastard.’ Pro wrestling is a form of entertainment where some form of ‘good versus evil’ is always central, its DNA as much medieval morality plays as it is circuses and gladiatorial combat.

Earl Black Jr provides Wes with a confident masculine identity he finds comforting after his literary failures. ‘His movements were more definite than mine, he was surer of himself. There was more purpose in his stride and a steely glint in his eye.’ Wes knows this character is a stereotype of manliness, but it gives him the stability he notices he and many other men his age are missing. ‘What wrestling offered was a ritualising of a masculine power that was otherwise neutralised by contemporary society’ and a socially safe context for ‘a masculinity that was now seen as dangerous, uneconomic and redundant.’ Given the crisis of masculinity manufactured by social media algorithms and radical right influencers online and in political offices, a space to work through these rituals of power seems not only healthy but potentially lifesaving. The physical and emotional work that comes from inhabiting a pro wrestler identity – ‘the ache in your bones, red hot muscle under duress, the thrill of feeling alive after so many years depressed, drunk and living in bad faith’ – offers Wes a way to reconcile his desire for respect from his peers and himself.  ‘Pro wrestling,’ he muses, ‘offered the opportunity for people with low status in real life the chance to play the type of masculine hero who they were not and could not be.’

Wes grew up with people living in bad faith. His father, Frank, spent Wes’s childhood wearing the stubborn masculinity of his years wrestling and bouncing clubs, a hard life that left him with ‘one leg fused together and a chunk of spine missing.’ His mother, Shirley, resented the limited horizons imposed by family and dreamed of a more cultured life. She talked openly about divorce to Wes and his brother. ‘Her plan was for me to be in secondary school, and she would then lose weight and get on a dating site.’ In the end, Frank is the one who leaves. Crippled by pain, he ends up in a disgusting flat which he sublets to pay for smack, an addiction as much about self-annihilation as it is physical relief. Meanwhile, Shirley embraces a new life with a girlfriend and middle-class affectations like eating ‘posh shit’ (granola and bagels) and buying an iMac that she leaves untouched on an antique desk. Ironically, any prior sense of life as a lesbian that Shirley has comes from her husband, relayed with the deadpan humour that ripples through the book,

Dad had lived with five lesbians in his house in Armley, who he knew from working on the doors of gay bars. Many of his ex-girlfriends were bisexual or outright gay. I would overhear conversations from the attic while they watched Prisoner: Cell Block H.

Unsurprisingly, Wes spent a lot of his childhood daydreaming about wrestling. He thought over and over about what kind of wrestler he would be. When he brawled with his brother or did stunts at school, it was performers like Mick Foley he had in mind. ‘Foley wasn’t a physical specimen, nor was he a great in-ring worker; what set him apart was his willingness to sacrifice himself for our sins, our perversion, our admiration.’ By the end of the Hell in a Cell ‘98, Foley had concussion, internal bleeding, several missing teeth and jaw and shoulder dislocations. Not something to aspire to, but, like Wes, I remember knowing that Foley was putting himself through everything for us, the fans. It was exhilarating.

At times, despite his passion for pro wrestling, Wes is vulnerable to a cynicism he suspects is his mother’s. She left her husband for a world in which she believed she could be her authentic self, one where scripted matches were anathema. ‘Wasn’t it all just seeing fake punches and fake men having fake fights?’ Wes worries as he watches a match. ‘How could anybody buy into the fakery of it all?’ Yet, in the end, Wes realises that pro wrestling’s often gleeful self-awareness gives it a frankness missing from so many aspects of modern life. It’s a vital insight given the ever-increasing stranglehold of male influencers like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate trying to straitjacket masculinity into its worst stereotypes, or the broader phenomenon of radical authenticity that dominates influencer culture. ‘Wasn’t it really that so much of life is equally silly,’ Wes concludes, ‘we had just become inured to it?’

While trying to come up with his wrestling character, Wes considers some of the other personas he has inhabited. Being a junkie left him sour, depressed and unsociable, not to mention in terrible health. Being a writer made him feel a fraud who failed to navigate the rituals of literary culture. ‘I had lost faith in novelly novels. In their fake plots, fake events, fake characters. I lost myself in drink and drugs and had the deal for my second book cancelled, which was a relief given how cartoonish it felt.’ Wrestling, on the other hand, gives him a place in the world which feels substantial, literally and metaphorically.

I enjoyed being introduced as a wrestler, people thinking I was a tough guy, wearing my crewcut and close-fitting T-shirts, the jokes about not messing around with him, because he’s a pro wrestler. It was infinitely better and more interesting than trying to explain what you did as a freelancer in the literature sector, something which felt surly, bourgeois and a dead end conversationally. Wrestlers, on the other hand, were larger than life, and wrestling was a spectacle that fascinated people.

I’ve no doubt many writers recognise that diffidence, the sudden impulse to qualify and downplay when people don’t know how to respond when you try to explain how you spend your time.

Some readers will be reminded of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, a novel in which lonely men use escalating spectacles of violence as therapy. I would also encourage you to seek out Wrestliana (2018) by Toby Litt, a more direct predecessor to Breaking Kayfabe that shares its straightforward but evocative prose style and blends fact and fiction to explore modern masculinity through wrestling.

In Wrestliana, Litt contends with the career of his great-great grandfather, William Litt, a smuggler, writer and champion Cumberland & Westmorland wrestler. Cumberland & Westmorland wrestling is a form of traditional British competitive wrestling very different from what Brown depicts, but it is still an activity where the men competing have to inhabit versions of themselves, characters who are unafraid of their opponents, full of self-belief in their abilities, willing to endure pain and endanger themselves.

The tale of William Litt haunts Toby because William is brought up each time Toby talks about being a novelist with his father, David. There are copies of William’s works in the family home and, when Toby announces in his teens that he plans to spend his life writing, the loving support of his parents is tinged with the ghost of the triumphant ancestor who, his father reminds him, would make a ‘great’ subject for a book. Such discussions always leave Toby fretting. ‘Wasn’t I exactly the wrong person to tell William’s story? I was a puny Southern desk-worker who played video games – what did I have to do with this rugged Northern sportsman?’ Toby puts off writing about William Litt for a long time, but after his mother dies and he watches his father go from his formerly immense stature to a diminished elderly figure, he realises it has become necessary. ‘Old age isn’t kind to men who have been big. […] Getting out of a chair took a paragraph rather than a line.’ His father slowing down, becoming less and less the man he remembered, finally prompts Toby to write the book, or a version of it, that his dad always wanted. Like Brown, Litt must navigate forms of kayfabe: how much of William’s life was made up? How much of William’s and his own life does Toby then fictionalise in the retelling? Wrestling, whatever form it takes, seems to invite storytelling. It should be no surprise that Mick Foley’s novels have been as well received as his wrestling memoirs.

What, though, do these books leave us with when modern masculinity remains, we are so often told, in crisis? They are in the first instance a reminder that identity is always a network of stories. What wrestling in particular seems to offer is a space where those stories can be owned, disregarded or reinvented entirely. They take place alongside, are intertwined with, physicality and a managed form of violence, all done in front of a crowd of spectators. In these conditions, masculinity becomes a thing to be played with, stretched, tested, undermined, even celebrated, but always with that self-awareness pro-wrestling can, at its best, do so well.

Breaking Kayfabe let me reconcile a childhood in front of the television with literary ambitions as an adult. Here was someone who, like me, has affected cultured pretensions since his twenties but in his heart of hearts knows that Foley-Calaway match and many like it in far more detail than anything since. We wanted the ludicrous bravado and drama of wrestling, to witness and share live storytelling studded with floodlit feats of strength and agility. As Roland Barthes wrote in his classic essay, ‘The World of Wrestling,’ ‘wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights.’ In Wrestliana, the inter-generational anxieties of Brown’s story are expanded over generations and centuries. What do you do with an inheritance of identity that seems impossible in the modern world? William Litt could be a champion wrestler and a novelist. Toby finds it hard to find time to run around with his children, let alone spend time exercising, and certainly not in a way that would achieve the fame and reward William managed. Writing about William is an act of reconciliation for Toby: with his ancestor’s reputation, with his father’s hopes, with his own unresolved but better understood sense of self and purpose.

Wrestling lets men watch and be around other men, witness men inhabit characters and storylines, and perhaps, on occasion, help them realise this is what happens in daily life, for everyone. Wrestling is also about kayfabe, a world in which inhabiting characters and telling stories is declared proudly through the spectacles it scripts and manufactures. The 16-foot drop, though, is always real.

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W. J. Davies is a writer and critic. His reviews, essays, interviews and short fiction have appeared in various publications including the Times Literary Supplement, Exacting Clam, Slightly Foxed, Review 31 and Poetry Birmingham. He has written a book-length study of Samuel Beckett and worked on two BBC documentaries, ‘Beckett’s Last Tapes’ and ‘The Battle of the Brows.’ He is occasionally on Bluesky.