Nattie Neidhart’s New Book Is Filled With Heart

Former Women's Champion opens up in The Last Hart Beating about rocky relationship with legendary father, TJ Wilson's career-ending injury, the women's revolution and much more

THERE ARE MEMOIRS that chronicle a career and then there are memoirs that carry a legacy.

The Last Hart Beating: From The Dungeon To WWE does something rarer still; it shoulders the sizeable legacy of Canada’s most celebrated wrestling family with grace, honesty and emotional courage.

And as it does so, the book poignantly reminds readers that Nattie Neidhart is genuinely the last of the Harts still standing in the professional wrestling world.

That reality hums beneath every chapter. Neidhart didn’t simply inherit a famous last name; she inherited expectation, pressure, a great deal of emotional and professional baggage and an unspoken responsibility to represent an entire lineage through her work as a wrestler.

What makes this book so compelling is the way in which Nattie confronts that heavy weight head-on, without any self-pity or grandstanding. She understands what the name means to fans globally, but she also grasps what it has cost her throughout her life and career.

Across two decades, Neidhart has carried herself with a professionalism and quiet dignity that now feels even more remarkable in hindsight.

In an industry that rewards spectacle and presentation above all else, Nattie has been something truly exceptional: steady, reliable and consistently professional, no matter the creative cards dealt.

Reading The Last Hart Beating, it becomes clear that her greatest achievement is not the titles she held or the matches won, but the fact that she has represented her family and herself with integrity throughout an era of huge change.

A Family Story

The Last Hart Beating is a family story first and foremost: one rooted in love, grief, fear and personal endurance. At its emotional core is Nattie’s complicated relationship with her father, WWE Hall of Famer and two-time tag team champion Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart.

These chapters are especially devastating in their honesty: Nattie speaks openly about her dad’s addictions, refusing to soften the truth or shield the reader from the emotional toll of the challenge of loving someone who is struggling.

When she writes, “I had lived my whole life in fear of a man I loved. I feared what he might do to himself, to our family [and] what was coming next,” it is impossible not to pause for a moment. Those words perfectly encapsulate the complex reality of loving someone deeply while also living in a constant state of vigilance. It is genuinely heart-breaking.

The chapters covering her father’s decline and eventual death in 2018 hit particularly hard for me on a personal level. Having lost my own father to Alzheimer’s a few years ago, I felt deeply connected to Nattie’s experience of watching someone you love slip away in slow, cruel increments. The confusion, the anticipatory grief and the helplessness: it is all there on the page.

I was with Nattie every step of the way, especially as she recounted the pain of knowing her father was unable to be there at ringside for her crowning career moment at SummerSlam 2017.

Lifting the SmackDown Women’s Championship should have been a moment of pure triumph for the veteran performer. Instead, it was a victory tainted by a father’s absence. That emotional duality, success entwined with loss, is one of the book’s most resonant themes.

Her close relationship with uncle Bret ‘Hitman’ Hart is handled with equal care.

Rather than leaning on nostalgia or mythology, Nattie presents their bond as one shaped by shared experience, mutual respect and hard-earned understanding; in one chapter, she explains how receiving just a few words of post-match praise from the Hitman was “pure gold”, recognising the particularly high standards that the Excellence of Execution expected of both himself and those around him.

It is yet more fascinating insight into a family that has now lived and breathed professional wrestling for close to a century.

The Physical and Emotional Cost of Wrestling

One of the most powerful sections of Nattie’s book, and one that has never been told in full before, centres around the career-ending injury suffered by husband TJ Wilson during a WWE event in 2015.

The tragic story, recounted in real time, is deeply affecting: the suddenness of it, the fear and the way life can change forever in an instant.

This section serves as a stark reminder of the risks professional wrestlers face each and every time they step into the ring for our entertainment. For all the spectacle and storytelling, the danger is all too real and the consequences can be permanent.

The inclusion of TJ’s accident and its aftermath grounds the romance of wrestling in reality, reminding readers that behind every match is a human cost rarely acknowledged. Yet it is also a testament to the power of forgiveness and the importance of being able to move forward from even the toughest of situations.

Nattie’s honesty extends to her own career missteps. Nothing is off limits, including recollections of the truly dire but thankfully short-lived “Nattie Neidfart” gimmick. Rather than resentment, Nattie approaches it with humour and perspective, demonstrating an emotional maturity that comes from survival rather than bitterness.

These moments highlight how often women in wrestling, especially during the WWE Divas era, were asked to endure indignity in silence, and how deep resilience was forged in spite of it.

Her reflections on Vince McMahon add another layer to one of wrestling’s most unique and contradictory figures, without ever slipping into caricature or condemnation. At some points, McMahon comes off positively and his human side is touching; at other times, her recollections of the former WWE chairman’s actions make for hard reading.

The Women’s Revolution

For all of the emotional weight that its pages carry, The Last Hart Beating is also filled with warmth. Stories of friendship and life on the road remind us that the travelling wrestling circus is sustained as much by camaraderie as it is by competition.

Fellow WWE performers come across in Nattie’s recollections as chosen family: anchors in a transient, often isolating profession. The Great Khali road stories, in particular, are joyful and unexpectedly tender, offering much-needed levity and a never-before-seen side of the giant Indian grappler.

Threaded throughout is the story of women’s wrestling itself. The transformation over the last decade is charted not as a marketing shift, but as a cultural reckoning. The cover image says it all: Nattie holding both the toyetic butterfly Divas Championship and the modern WWE Women’s Championship. It is the perfect visual representation of the hard journey that Nattie, and her fellow female performers, have had to travel.

Nattie emerges as a foundational figure in the women’s evolution. Not always the loudest, very rarely spotlighted but undeniably essential.

She was seen as the workhorse player: the one trusted to elevate others, to stabilise divisions and to make rising stars look great.

Total Divas is covered for the role that the popular TV series played in raising the stock of WWE’s female stars during an era when airtime on WWE TV was extremely limited for females. The rise of Charlotte Flair and the pair's history-making NXTTakeover clash is also rightly framed as a turning point for women’s wrestling, emblematic of the new standards that the division would soon rise to the occasion to meet.

Nattie Neidhart: The Last of the Harts

Co-written by Paul O’Brien, author of the Blood Red Turns Dollar Green series and Jim Ross’ excellent trilogy of memoirs, The Last Hart Beating is a confident, emotionally precise and deeply human recollection of a life lived with passion.

I finished the book wanting to hear more, yet also feeling completely satisfied by the story Nattie chose to tell.

If there is any justice in the wrestling world, the next step should be inevitable: an induction into the WWE Hall of Fame and the opportunity for Natayla Neidhart to stand proudly and rightly alongside her goateed, anvil-throwing, legendary father.

Few have carried a wrestling legacy with as much dignity and consistency as Nattie Neidhart. Fewer still have written about it with this much heart. The Last Hart Beating: From The Dungeon To WWE is available now from BenBella Books

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