Meet the Family
Sonny & Teresa: A Love Story Across Generations was inspired by real people, preserved photographs, family documents, and stories passed from one generation to the next.
Although the novel allowed me to imagine private conversations and bring long-ago moments to life, the people at its heart were members of my family. Each carried a history, a culture, and a set of convictions that helped shape Sonny and Teresa’s journey.
Here, you can meet the real people behind the characters—and discover how their personalities, traditions, sacrifices, and relationships became part of the story.
Sonny and Teresa Grasso
An Italian-American ballplayer from Staten Island and an Irish-American nursing student from Iowa, Sonny and Teresa met unexpectedly at a minor-league baseball game in Kansas in 1948. Their chance encounter became a sixty-two-year marriage—and the love story that inspired the novel.
Sebastian “Sonny” Grasso
Sebastian “Sonny” Grasso was a Staten Island ballplayer whose journey through military service, postwar Japan, and professional baseball carried him to Leavenworth, Kansas. There, a chance meeting with Teresa in 1948 began a sixty-two-year marriage—and the love story at the heart of the novel.
Teresa Rigor Grasso
Teresa Rigor was an Iowa-born nursing student whose early losses shaped her quiet strength, deep faith, and devotion to family. In the summer of 1948, a reluctant trip to a baseball game in Leavenworth, Kansas, led her to Sonny—and began the sixty-two-year love story at the heart of the novel.