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
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.
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Praise
“Magic Season is a beautiful, poignant and, yes, magical memoir that captures the tough and tender bonds between father and son. At turns hilarious and heartbreaking, this book will captivate readers from start to finish.”—John Searles, New York Times bestselling author of Help For The Haunted and Her Last Affair
“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
“The beauty of Magic Season is Wade Rouse’s ability to illustrate the tensions between a conservative father and his gay son while simultaneously presenting their irrefutable love affair. The story moves readers deftly through the vicissitudes of traditional patriarchy and misogyny and demonstrates how these cultural norms strangle boys who refuse the assumed allure of toxic masculinity. Using the game of baseball as theoretical frame, this moving memoir teaches not only truths about the difficulty of masculine healing but also the joy of life a man knows once he attains it.”—Daniel Black, author of Don’t Cry for Me
“Eloquent, profound, and as funny as it is heartbreaking, Magic Season is a poignant reminder that those of us who’ve had rocky upbringings have a choice—we can turn mean, or we can go down to our tenderest parts and truly be ourselves, open to love. Wade’s story will make you realize that things in life—like people—can always change, if you just don’t give up on them. This glorious memoir hits it out of the park.”—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of With or Without You
“Wade Rouse’s masterful memoir about coming out and coming to grips with his cantankerous, conservative father over a shared love of baseball is a pitch-perfect blend of storytelling, emotional discovery, and survival humor. Home run!”—Meredith May, author of The Honey Bus and Loving Edie