Dear Reader:
Welcome! I'm SO glad you're here!
I am the USA TODAY, Publishers Weekly and internationally bestselling author of 14 books, including five memoirs and nine novels. I write fiction under the pen name, Viola Shipman, as a tribute to my working poor Ozarks grandma, whose family stories, heirlooms and love inspire my novels. I also write nonfiction under my own name. I was a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards in Humor (I lost to Tina Fey) and was named by Writer’s Digest as “The #2 Writer, Dead or Alive, We’d Like to Have Drinks With” (I was sandwiched between Ernest Hemingway and Hunter Thompson).
MAGIC SEASON: A Son’s Story (which publishes May 3 and is available for preorder now) is my first memoir in over a decade. I am so deeply proud of it.
It is, in short, the hardest, most beautiful book I’ve written to date.
Long before I was a writer, I was simply Ted Rouse’s son.
My father was an Ozarks man, born and bred, a mystery, the chemical engineer who measured, calculated everything, even emotion. He chided me for not being a real man. I was a boy of all emotion. You get the picture. But I had a lot of the Ozarks in me, too, which can make a man as hard and unforgiving as the rocky terrain. What did I have to forgive my father for? How long do you have? And yet I loved him. So deeply my heart still flutters about my chest to this day, just like a good knuckleball.
Which is why every time he patted the couch, I would take a seat next to him. Up until the very last game.
The only thing that bonded us was our love of baseball and the St. Louis Cardinals, and MAGIC SEASON Takes place, inning by inning, over the last baseball game we ever watched together, ironically, a playoff game between the Cards and Cubs, whose intense rivalry matched ours.
You will likely ask why I stuck by my father, so I ask you this: Why do you stick by your favorite team, season after miserable season. It’s because, no matter how pessimistic we’ve grown, we always believe a magical season will occur and obliterate all the bad memories that came before. A true fan believes in his heart even a terrible team can turn into a great one.
Life, like being a baseball fan, relies on two things: hope and forgiveness. Which is why I took a seat by my father in our last game together praying for a walk off homerun in the bottom of the ninth inning.
This memoir is a history of baseball, and a collective history of all our deepest relationships. At its heart, this is a story about what we – as parents and children – seek most: Unconditional love.
As I write in the memoir:
"But I do know love. All its beauty and horror, all its tricks and wonder.
I know because I waited my entire life to find it. I searched for it, like I used to do diamonds when my parents would take me to Arkansas gem fields, and I would dig in the dirt all day long, as though my life depended on it.
I lost a brother, a mother, nearly my entire family.
Yet here I sit watching a game with my father and my husband.
And I know love is not shaped like a heart.
We’ve had it wrong all these years.
It’s shaped like a baseball.
Love may seem as round and as easy to toss about from one person to the next, just like an infielder warming up before a game. But it isn’t. Love comes right at you, pitch after pitch, inning after inning, game after game, season after season: Sometimes it’s a fastball, sometimes it’s disguised as a knuckler, but most often love is a curve. You don’t know where it’s going.
Sometimes, you’ll miss it, badly. Sometimes, you’ll foul it off.
But sometimes, you end up getting a mighty swing at it.
And if you make contact, you’re not lucky. You’re damn good.
Because you never took your eye off it, from beginning to end.”
MAGIC SEASON hits bookstores May 3. I hope this book will change you as much as it changed me. With your support, let’s knock this out of the park. For more, visit. www.waderouse.com
Here is more about the memoir:
"Honest, authentic, heartbreaking and healing. I devoured it in one day."—Jenny Lawson, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"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
“A poignant memoir of pain and hope.”-Kirkus
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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