Overview

In Spinning Tea Cups: A Mythical American Memoir, Alexandra Teague explores cycles of family trauma and both the dangerous and recuperative powers of fantasy. Teague attempts to understand and contextualize her “feral Victorian” family in terms of trauma and mental health, but also with deep love and humor. How did people who prided themselves on making everything from scratch take annual trips to Disney World? What did it mean that Teague’s mother claimed to have psychic abilities? How did her sensitive youngest nephew end up talking in a voice that wasn’t his own? Why did Teague, the daughter of educated non-conformist parents, marry as a teenager (with her parents’ blessing) and spend seven years in an abusive relationship? How do family legacies of grief and dysfunction and creativity intersect? How do any of us make meaning or escape our circumstances without replicating the fantasies or escapism with which we’ve been raised? Teague is carefully attuned to the vagaries of geographical cultures, and she weaves her family’s history and weighty explorations of trauma and psychology not just with pop culture but with the specific cultures of the places she and her family pass through: the Bay Area, a tiny college town in the Inland Northwest, a Southwest ghost town, a Texas city, an Arkansas hippie bubble, and Central Florida suburb. Spinning Tea Cups will appeal to readers interested in American cultural studies, those concerned with the ongoing crisis of mental illness in this country, and those who simply love strange, quirky, richly told stories.

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9780870712555

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"""Is Alexandra Teague the child of psychics who can see in the world the possibility of life after death, of spells, of spirits, of foreknowledge? Or is she collateral damage of people too concerned with their own magical thinking to keep her best interests at heart? The book is at its most gripping at the knife-edge of these questions, when Teague fights to become her own self, author of her own story, able to poke tender fun at the many different versions of herself."" --Cris Harris, author of I Have Not Loved You With My Whole Heart"

Author Information

Alexandra Teague is professor of English and co-director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Idaho. She is the author of three volumes of poetry and a novel, The Principles Behind Flotation.

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