“Alexandra Teague’s Spinning Tea Cups narrates an extraordinary family’s struggles with the realities and unrealities of mental illness. Is she the child of psychics who can see ghosts, spells, spirits, and foreknowledge as clear as a fire at night? Or is she collateral damage of people too lost in their own magical thinking to see her needs? Erudite, intellectual, literary, these essays explore puns, ghosts, tourism, but always at their heart is Teague’s own relationship to her family, and by extension, to her understanding of self, a young woman moving through the definitions others have for her to take control of her own destiny.”
—Cris Harris, author of I Have Not Loved You With My Whole Heart
“While the uncovering of a magician’s trick often drains it of power, the revelations in Alexandra Teague’s essays only increase the potency of their magic. Spinning Tea Cups is fantastic in both senses of the word. It is smart and compelling and gorgeously written. It also balances credulity in the other-worldly with clear-eyed reassessment of what’s usually called ‘the facts,’ creating a complex, deeply human portrait of self and family.”
—Kate Lebo, author of The Book of Difficult Fruit
“This memoir-in-essays recounts growing up in a family of ‘feral Victorians’ in the eccentric occult town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas. With essayistic ruminations on matters of faith, kitsch, mental health, gun violence, and memory, Spinning Tea Cups has all the page-turning pleasures of an engaging story, along with insight, wisdom, and exquisite prose.”
—Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The Witch of Eye