Next week – March 16, to be exact – my daughter Emma Span joins the authorial ranks with her new book, “90 per cent of the game is half mental,” already getting nice reviews. Her book party is next week in Brooklyn, of course, and I’m going as proud papa and official photographer. It takes Em a lot longer to write a book than it makes me, but then she has taken on a pretty big subject. And she labors over every word, five or six times. They had to pry the book out of her hands.

Although the book is nominally about her strange experiences as a New York baseball fan, it is, of course, about much more. It’s a coming of age memoir, I think, a book about work in New York these days, and about an outsider coming to terms with an insider world, a subject that is perhaps familiar to her. Her chapter on movies is hilarious, not in the least because she recounts in great and merciless detail my dragging her to movies since she was in a stroller. I got in trouble taking her to see Terminator II when she was eight or nine, and we had to go back and see it again because her eyes were closed for most of the first viewing.

She has lots of fun poking Dad, as is only fair.

Emma’s odyssey took her through some awful and scary jobs in New York and finally to work as a baseball writer, at least until she got canned in a corporate takeover. Emma never quite figured out (I think she did) whether she wanted to be watching the game from the press box or out in a bar. The book is funny, but also pretty poignant, at least to me. I keep thinking of O Henry’s amazing accounts of the smart people who came to New York to make it and of their struggles. There’s a lot of that in here. Anyway, it’s coming out next week, and as a completely unbiased observer, I can’t recommend it highly enough.