That’s What Friends Are For

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A USA Today Bestseller
Today Show “Best Feel-Good” Read
A Book Bub Top Selection for March
A Zibby Owens Most Anticipated Book Pick of 2026!
New York Post Gift Guide Pick!
People Exclusive Cover Reveal
A Palm Springs Speaks 2026 Featured Book & Author

In this poignant and hilarious story inspired by the beloved TV sitcom, The Golden Girls,  bestselling author Wade Rouse celebrates love, aging, finding your people, and the art of impeccably timed one-liners.

Theodore Copeland has created a fabulous life in the desert oasis of Palm Springs, where he shares a fabulous pink mid-century home with three fabulous friends: Barry, a former actor still clinging to his youth, his hair, and the memory of the dream role that killed his career; Ron, an uprooted Christian from the Midwest with a big heart but no one to give it to; Sid, who after coming out late in life has never found love; with Teddy as the caustic, unspoken leader of “The Golden Gays”—the foursome’s monthly drag tribute to The Golden Girls. Despite their foibles and bickering, they have turned their golden years into a golden era.

But the harmony of their desert enclave becomes a carousel of emotional baggage when Teddy’s estranged sister, Trudy, shows up on their doorstep, her dramatic teenage granddaughter in tow. While Teddy keeps Trudy at arms’ length, she manages to  wheedle her way into the lives of the Golden Gays, until the real reason for her visit is revealed and the secrets they’ve all been keeping from each other unravel faster than a hastily stitched hemline.

America’s Boy

Newly Republished

“A revelatory story about acceptance, pride, and the many ways even a seemingly prejudiced family can surprise us” by the bestselling author of Magic Season (The Washington Post).

Indie Next List “Great Read” Selection
American Library Association’s Inaugural “Rainbow List” Selection

In this memoir, writer and journalist Wade Rouse delivers a humorous and heartwarming account of his Midwestern childhood and coming of age as a gay man.

Born in Granby, a small farm town in the southwest Missouri Ozarks, Wade was a fish out of water as long as he could remember—or at least since he participated in his family’s mock Miss America pageant when he was just five years old, clad in his grandmother’s red “whore” heels and his mother’s black-and-white polka-dot bikini.

Life didn’t get easier in Wade’s conservative hometown, especially after his older brother died just a month after Wade graduated junior high school. It was then that Wade buried his brother—and his sexuality, so his parents wouldn’t mourn the loss of a second son. Finally, after years of a descent into obsessive-compulsive behaviors and overeating, Wade was able to come out to himself, losing weight and gaining confidence until he had nothing left to hide.

Filled with memories of happiness and heartbreak, America’s Boy is both “a quirky tribute to [Rouse’s] rural Ozark family, and an easily digestible, homespun tale of a bygone era in Middle America” (Time Out Chicago).

Praise

“A storyteller and a memoirist in the best sense of the words. . . . Reading Rouse’s memoir is more like sitting with a good friend and a cold beer, trading stories and remembering those things that may have been painful or tragic at the time, but must now be respected for what they are.” —Metro Weekly

Magic Season: A Son’s Story

“Honest, authentic, heartbreaking and healing. Magic Season explores, in such a poignant yet hopeful way, the complicated family relationships that break us and make us. I devoured it in one day.”
—Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestselling author

A 2023 Michigan Notable Book Award Winner!

Bestselling author Wade Rouse finds solace with his dying father through their shared love of baseball in this poignant, illuminating memoir of family and forgiveness.

Before his success in public relations, his loving marriage and his storied writing career, Wade Rouse was simply Ted Rouse’s son. A queer kid in a conservative Ozarks community, Wade struggled at a young age to garner his father’s approval and find his voice. For his part, Ted was a hard-lined engineer, offering little emotional support or encouragement. But Wade and Ted had one thing in common: an undying love of the St. Louis Cardinals.

For decades, baseball offered Wade and his father a shared vocabulary—a way to stay in touch, to connect and to express their emotions. But when his father’s health takes a turn for the worst, Wade returns to southwest Missouri to share one final season with his father. As the Cards race towards a dramatic pennant race, Wade and his father begin to open up in way they never thought possible. Together, inning by inning during their own magic season, they’ll move towards forgiveness, reconciliation, and peace.

Heartfelt, hilarious and lovingly rendered, Magic Season is an unforgettable story of love, family and forgiveness against the backdrop of America’s favorite pastime.