Making It Home

Starred review from May 15, 2023
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. Agent: Anthony Mattero, CAA.