Making It Home
Life Lessons from a Season of Little League
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
"This is a story about a team that becomes a family and a family that becomes a team. . . a wonderful book ." -- Cal Ripken, Jr.
"A MUST READ!"--USA TODAY (ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2023)
An achingly heartfelt and surprisingly funny memoir about family, grief, and moving forward.
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.
There are no therapeutically trained facilitators and no rules other than those dictated by the Little League of America, and the human heart. 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Strasser (Exploiting My Baby) hits it out of the park in this wise—and wisecracking—memoir of grief and baseball. Four months after the death of her brother, Strasser's mother dies, too. Reeling from those losses, she and her father, a "former mechanic with no desire to talk death," become fixtures at her son's Little League games, which bring them solace and offer tools for processing the tragedies. Strasser leans hard on metaphors about grief resembling baseball ("Hang in there against the pitch. Let the pitch hit you if that's what physics has in store, and get curious about exactly how and where it stings"), but there's hardly a foul ball in the bunch. Little League teaches her to attend to the "sliver of hope" in her heart, and that "almost any damage is reversible"; baseball doesn't "promise a happy ending," she muses, "but it always leaves room for one." Wringing a surprising amount of pathos from her central conceit, Strasser transforms her grief into a lighthearted manual for soldiering through loss. Readers need never have set foot on a baseball diamond to get this heartwarming message.
