Making It Home

Description

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.Praise for Exploiting My Baby

“…A raw, often unsettling and always entertaining look at pregnancy and childbirth. Strasser flaunts her ability to worry about anything, her many documented imperfections and brings it all down to some seriously funny prose.”
-Rick Kleffel, NPR

“Hilarious first time memoir about motherhood.”
–Life & Style

“Teresa’s pain is your gain. The toll pregnancy and birth have taken on her marriage, career, psyche and cervix are all laid bare for your info-tainment. Her neurotic neonatal journey will make you laugh and cry. It might even make you aroused (if you’re into that sort of thing).”
-Adam Carolla

“Strasser’s collection of essays is a comic, poignant and no-holds-barred revelation of her anxiety-strewn road to motherhood.”
–Laguna Beach Independent

“If you think you worry too much about being a parent, Teresa Strasser will inform you of all the things you forgot to freak out about.”
-Joel Stein

“I loved this book. Teresa Strasser has blessed us all with an amazing, inspired work. I laughed, I cried, I learned lessons about marriage and love and pregnancy and motherhood that will last a lifetime.”
-Rabbi Naomi Levy, author of Hope Will Find You and To Begin AgainTeresa Strasser is an Emmy-winning writer (Comedy Central) and Emmy-nominated television host (TLC). She has been a contributor to the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Arizona Republic, The Jewish Journal, HuffPost, and The Today Show. Her first-person essays have garnered three Los Angeles Press Club Awards, including Columnist of the Year. She’s appeared on The View, CNN, Good Morning America, The Talk, and Dr. Phil. Radio and podcast audiences know her as Adam Carolla’s co-host. Her first memoir, Exploiting My Baby: Because It’s Exploiting Me was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and optioned by ABC.US