Tea: A Novel [Hardcover]

Stacey D'Erasmo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2000

On a spring day in 1968, eight-year-old Isabel Gold sets out tea, just so, for her unpredictable, ever-moody mother, and sits down to wait, certain that this will do it: her mother will drink the tea Isabel has made and recover from her mysterious sadness.

But the tea goes untouched. Isabel's mother remains out of reach, a kind of melancholy stranger Isabel struggles to understand.

Then, her mother kills herself.

As Isabel comes of age, that incomprehensible act haunts her. Isabel grows up, yearns to become an actress, and falls in and out of love: at eight, with born-again Ann, who proclaims happily, "I love Jesus"; at sixteen, listening to Joni Mitchell records and smoking dope with Lottie, who "never apologizes and never explains"; at seventeen, with theatrical feminist Rebecca; and at twenty-two, with avant-garde Thea, in whose experimental film Isabel is starring-or trying to-as the goddess Diana.

Of all the women in her life, however, the one who still eludes her is herself.

Funny, poignant, and sexy, Tea speaks to those who grew up listening to the Monkees and Peter Frampton, culling marijuana seeds on album covers, but who fled the suburbs for the glamorous squalor of the city. It speaks to those who discovered they were gay and had to find a way to tell the rest of the world. And it speaks to anyone who has struggled to carve out a space for themselves against a tragic family history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Stacey D'Erasmo will be a familiar name to anyone who reads the Village Voice. During the years she worked at that quintessential alternative weekly, her beautiful, trenchant essays were among the paper's real drawing cards. Writing on a wide variety of topics--from the brainlessness of certain "do me" feminists to the arrest of ex-'60s radical Katherine Ann Power--D'Erasmo always managed to distill her response into a few devastating elements, her prose driven by quiet rage and an impatient, electric poetry. Like the political writing of Joan Didion, these have proven to be unforgettable essays that deserve to be collected soon.

All of which brings us to Tea, D'Erasmo's first work of fiction. Essentially a coming-of-age tale, it's divided into three periods in the life of one Isabel Gold--from girlhood through her early 20s. The first section, "Morning," is weakest, full of the familiar tropes of damaged childhood: the beautiful suicidal mother, the passive, clever narrator who keeps staring out the car window. But as the book picks up, D'Erasmo sharpens her focus, and Isabel's world takes on a vibrant particularity and humor. Here, for instance, is a slyly hilarious description of a film project she and her girlfriend are working on:

Their film was experimental; it incorporated all the theories they both knew about film, but, they both felt certain, went beyond those theories.... It didn't have a title yet; they couldn't find the phrase that encompassed, or referenced, all the myriad things their film was. It was political. It was nonlinear. It was diffuse. It made use of film as film.

Passages like this call to mind the early-1990s film Go Fish, which also took place in an East Coast world of smart, gay women just out of college who are settling into an urban subculture and making homes in a city where their desires can be easily expressed and absorbed. Fans of that film's liberal-arts-grad realism will welcome Tea. But readers who have anxiously followed D'Erasmo's work may chafe when coming across details such as Pier 1 rattan chairs, La-Z-Boy recliners, and Hill Street Blues--specifics that can date and sometimes diminish this intermittently powerful work. --Emily White

From Publishers Weekly

In her wry, sensitive first novel, D'Erasmo, a former editor at the Voice Literary Supplement and Bookforum, charts the crucial moments of young Isabel Gold's coming of age before and after the suicide of her mother. The protagonist and her sister, Jeannie, live with their parents in a Philadelphia suburb. Isabel's father runs a dry-cleaning business and her mother, Cassie, runs off to New York to see musicals or stays home glued to the soaps while drinking whisky from a teacup. As a young girl, Isabel studies the ancient Romans and sees her family life as bits of evidence for future archeologists looking for clues. While Isabel observes her mother's fragile state, the narrative follows Isabel's maturationAher teenage friendship with the blonde sylph, Lottie, and Lottie's boyfriend, Ben; her first love affair with a woman, whom she meets at a community theater; and her wrenching first heartbreak. Isabel's mother's suicide takes place offstage, and D'Erasmo reveals how and when the memories of her mother's life and death insinuate themselves into Isabel's consciousness. Punctuated by moments that are radiantly moving (every year Isabel imagines the gift her mother would give her for her birthday) or hilarious (Isabel's childhood friend, playing Get Smart, calls God on the shoe phone), D'Erasmo's tale eschews labels, politics and generalizations. Hers is an intimate story, suffused with irony, humor and a close, sensuous attention to physical detail. Isabel's world opens up generously, providing the reader with the intimate truths and emotional complexity that make this impressive debut unforgettable. Agent, Jennifer Carlson. 5-city author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books (January 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565122437
• ISBN-13: 978-1565122437
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,218,237 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

STACEY D'ERASMO is the author of the novels Tea, a New York Times Notable Book, and A Seahorse Year, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year and a Lambda Literary Award winner. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and Ploughshares. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction, she is currently an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. She lives in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Smart, compelling fiction, February 24, 2000

By 

stinkerbelle (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tea: A Novel (Hardcover)

I was familiar with some of D'Erasmo's writing in the Voice, and so I looked forward to reading Tea. Simply put, this is a terrific novel; it was compulsively readable and struck a perfect balance between detached third-person narration and the at times overwhelming emotions of Isabel, its protagonist. There wasn't an overabundance of attention on the establishment of Isabel's sexual identity, and I liked that D'Erasmo focused instead on other aspects of character development. The book's sharp humor appealed to me, and overall, this was a relatively quick but still satisfying read.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully raw novel, July 17, 2001

By 

carmelbooks "carmelbooks" (Southern California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tea (Paperback)

At first, "Tea" did not hook me like so many other stories have. I felt that it was vague and stale, D'Erasmo only partially achieving the artistic storyline that was obviously being attempted.

However, by the time I reached the second section, "Afternoon," I could not set the book down. What at first had seemed mundane and ordinary had taken on a new shape. I began to realize that the beauty of D'Erasmo's story was in its simplicity. An unexpected intimacy with Isabel, the main character, had been established, and I was eager to read along, to watch her discover life and loss.

In no way was Isabel perfect. She was confused and idiosyncratic -- an inquistive, introspective, ordinary child who grew to be a resiliant, astute, yet ordinary twenty-something with a passionate will to survive.

The beauty of D'Erasmo's writing comes through the simplicity it conveys, through both form and content. The words are raw, yet powerful.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A STORY TOLD WITH WIT, REALITY, AND TRUTH, February 23, 2001

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Tea: A Novel (Hardcover)

How many have fled suburbia for "the big city" in hopes of achieving self-actualization and fulfilling artistic dreams? Once there, they may realize that although they've left family home behind much of the past has journeyed with them.

Such is the case with Isabel Gold, the memorable protagonist of Tea, an impressive first novel by book reviewer and editor Stacey D'Erasmo. Emotionally complex and arrestingly candid, Tea heralds the debut of a writer with a gift for original imagery and perceptive reading of the human heart.

With a nod to middle America in the 1970s Tea opens as a young Isabel accompanies Cassie, her mother, on a house hunting expedition in the country. Cassie is a nurse who once dreamed of being an actress; Mr. Gold owns and operates a dry cleaning business.

A school project, replicating an ancient Roman house, takes much of Isabel's time until April of 1968 when Cassie commits suicide "at the hospital where she worked, locking herself in a supply closet with a vast amount of pills, as if to say: This is the size of my hunger."

Jeannie, the Gold's only other child, is very much unlike Isabel. She loves machinery, going to the dry cleaning store and seeing the dolly, the steamer, the presser "with its thick padded arms." Jeannie collects puppies, stuffed animals. She acquiesces. Isabel tests boundaries, beginning with hours spent at Lottie's house. They slather themselves with a peroxide and baby oil mixture to toast in the sun. Lottie is a leader, "the rule giver." She shoplifts a black bikini for Isabel, and gives Isabel her first lesbian kiss. The third member of their triune is "alternately wired and silent" Ben.

Eventually, Isabel volunteers with a theater group that is presenting "Equus." She is rewarded by being allowed to play a horse. Since the memory of Cassie is never far from her mind, Isabel wonders if her mother did really have potential as an actress: "If she did have potential, she died still clutching it in her hands, like unplayed cards."

"Isabel intended to play them all. All of them, one by one. Beginning with this beautiful silver horse."

Following college, she tries to play those cards by moving to New York City with her lover, Thea, "whose family was Greek, and rich, and thoroughly scandalized by her." Living in an Avenue A apartment, they subsist on "Isabel's paychecks from her lowly office job at the Van Zandt Foundation for the Arts and Thea's paychecks from driving a newspaper delivery truck." Their goal is to make an experimental film about the goddess Diana.

Yet, as her 22nd birthday approaches, Isabel still cannot escape thoughts of her mother. She imagines "slowly, what her mother would have given her on this birthday."

"Isabel had done this on every birthday since her mother died. At nine, the imaginary gifts were meeting the Monkees and white go-go boots and every single Nancy Drew. At twelve, a record player, a trip to California, just the two of them. At eighteen, a dalmatian and a long red silk scarf, and at twenty-one, a piece of property in the woods no one knew about."

Related in three sections, each an important juncture in the life of Isabel Gold, Tea is a coming of age tale, a story of intellectual and physical intimacy related with wit, reality and truth.

It is also an important juncture in the life of Stacey D'Erasmo as it introduces her to the world as a major talent.