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In Comeback Season, Cathy Day, author of the highly praised novel The Circus in Winter, tells the heartwarming story of how she got back in the game of love -- thanks to her favorite football team, the Indianapolis Colts. In 2005, Day, an Indiana native, moves to Pittsburgh to start her dream job. She's thirty-seven, a college professor, an acclaimed writer -- and still single. Psyching herself up, she thinks, "This is the year for the Colts and for me." Instead, both Day and quarterback Peyton Manning face heartbreaking end-of-season losses: the man in her life decides to punt, and the Colts fall to the Pittsburgh Steelers, the eventual Super Bowl champs. Her blue heart broken, Day vows that if the Colts can come back in 2006 and try again, so can she. Inspired by Manning's legendary perfectionism, Day spends the off-season "in training." She gets in shape, imagining that she's Rocky Balboa running through the Philadelphia streets to the tune of "Gonna Fly Now." She quits smoking. She reads dating primers. She watches Sex and the City. She takes notes. She asks everyone she knows, "Um, do you know any men my age who aren't married?" Come preseason, Day reluctantly joins an online dating service and goes on practice dates while the Colts play practice games. Indy goes 1-4 in the preseason, which is better than Day's record of 0-4. Lonely and dejected, Day returns home to watch Colts games with her family, who are full of well-intentioned relationship advice -- much of it bad. The 2006 season finally arrives. Each week that fall, the Colts battle a new adversary and Day faces her enemies: her own romanticism, indecisive men, and her biggest foe, the singles industry. Friends and family deliver impassioned pep talks but can only watch anxiously from the sidelines as Day marches bravely into bars and coffee shops to meet perfect strangers. On the way to the Super Bowl, she discovers that the key to winning -- in both love and football -- exists somewhere between Trying Everything and Letting Go. Honest, touching, and frequently hilarious, Comeback Season tells a timeless story about our need to feel connected to people and to places. This year-long chronicle of one woman's journey will resonate with anyone who's ever looked for love...fumbled...recovered! and kept charging down the field.… (more)
User reviews
Comeback Season chronicles Cathy Day’s experience jumping back into the dating game over the course of the 2006 Indianapolis Colts season. A lover of both football and “locker room speeches,” Day uses the tenacity of Peyton Manning and the Colts as an inspiration to make a genuine effort to overcome dating obstacles in her career, a new city renowned for dating difficulty for professional women, and her own patterns of unsuccessful partner choices. She bravely reveals her foray into the online dating world, and single-handedly fights a predatory scam dating service. At times Day’s emotional admissions are all too painfully familiar to many professional women, but she manages to keep things in perspective with a sharp wit and outright laugh-out-loud humor. Day employs an imaginary female sports reporter to inject both self deprecating humor and social commentary, and it quickly becomes clear that the reporter embodies the traditional expectations that Day has to fight against throughout her dating season.
More importantly, Comeback Season is a commentary about the unexpected results of the feminist movement. It is now far more common for women to put off getting married out of high school or an undergrad program in order to pursue a career and education. This is, unquestionably, a success for the feminist movement, but it doesn’t take into consideration the disparity between developing personal relationships and professional success that so many of those independent women, such as Day, face. When young girls were told that they can be whatever they wanted, all too often their attentions turned to career aspirations woefully devoid of female role models. Logically, then, those same young girls looked to male heroes to pattern their career paths after. Decades later it is no wonder that daughters of the early feminist movement are the ones left with the task of figuring out how to navigate between domestic desires and professional aspirations without crumbling under pressure to abandon one or the other. Couple this with the high personal and professional expectations of university English departments, and Day captures the complex lives of many female academics today.
To dismiss Comeback Season as merely a dating memoir is a mistake. Too often “serious” social commentaries are expected to be dry, boring, emotionless, and full of jargon. Because Day writes with an accessible, often humorous, style and does so without masking the core issues of her journey behind opaque symbolism, the questions her experience raises will reach more women, and generate more constructive discussion about road blocks women face, but are ashamed to discuss for fear of being perceived as weak. After all, the problems that intelligent, professional women face aren’t trapped inside the ivory tower. Cathy Day brings those issues to the streets in a way anyone can understand.
Review by Dawn Papuga