Making It Home: Life Lessons from a Season of Little League

An achingly heartfelt and surprisingly funny memoir about family, grief, and moving forward by an award-winning writer and TV personality.

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.

Teresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning writer and Emmy-nominated television host. Other television appearances include covering the red carpet for the Academy Awards, the Tony Awards, and the Emmy Awards; as a field correspondent for Good Day New York; as a regular guest on Dr. Phil, The Doctors, and CNN’s Headline News; and The Talk, The View, Good Morning America, and many local news shows in Phoenix and Los Angeles. Radio and podcast audiences know her as the co-host of The Adam Carolla Show and the new podcast Easy Listening. She has also blogged for HuffPost Comedy, HuffPost Parents, Modern Loss, and The Today Show.