Making It Home
An achingly heartfelt and surprisingly funny memoir about family, grief, and moving forward by an award-winning writer and TV personality.
“Essayist Strasser hits it out of the park in this wise — and wisecracking — memoir of grief and baseball.”
“This is a story about a team that becomes a family and a family that becomes a team. It is a wonderful book that powerfully captures how we work through life’s challenges with baseball as a backdrop.”
“Gripping, poetic, powerful, magical, at times funny, and at times heartbreaking. I feel forever changed having experienced it.”
“This book may be about Little League, but Teresa is a Major League talent.”
“Moving, funny, sad, hopeful, it will strike a chord with anyone who is grieving, anyone with a child playing sports, anyone who has ever obsessed over something as a means of coping — pretty much everyone, really. ”
“It’s a perfect book for fans of baseball, and also wonderful for those who aren’t.”
“Making It Home knocked me out of the park.”
“This is a story about learning to lose with patience and self-compassion — in baseball and in life.”
“A beautifully crafted story that, I promise you, you have not read anywhere before. Is it heartbreaking? Yes. Will it cause you to tear up? Possibly. But at the same time, it’s undeniably funny, a bit scurrilous, disrespectful, and outrageous. Did I mention funny?”
When her brother dies from cancer, and then her mother just four months later, Teresa Strasser has no one to mourn with but her irresponsible, cantankerous, trailerpark-dwelling father. He claims not to remember her chaotic childhood, but he’s a devoted grandpa, so as her son embarks on his first season pitching in Little League, Teresa and Nelson form a grief group of two in beach chairs lined up behind the first base line.
For Teresa and her father, the stages of grief are the draft, the regular season, and the playoffs. One season of baseball becomes the framework for a memoir about family, loss, and the fundamentals of baseball and life. They cheer, talk smack about other teams, scream at each other in the parking lot, and care way too much about Little League.
Making It Home is a bracingly honest journey through grief, self-doubt, and anxiety armed with humor and optimism. After all, America’s pastime may be just a game, but it always leaves room for redemption, even at the bottom of the lineup.
