I’ve been positively evangelistic about Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, since I first came across it a year ago. A breakthrough hit in the US, it won a host of accolades including the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize for First Fiction and is now published in the UK by the Pushkin Press.
In a tidal wave of recent work exploring women’s lives and experiences, Philyaw’s work stands out as fresh, gutsy and charged with hurtling energy. Her stories resist lazy tropes at every turn. Her characters are complicated, messed up and easy to warm to. Her plots, tight little nuggets of tragicomedy. Each story feels like Philyaw has pulled the curtain back and allowed us to glimpse something private and intimate. Yet the gaze is never voyeuristic so much as affirming and empathetic. It’s rare to read short stories which so generously reward the reader’s curiosity.
Sisterhood
The nine longish shorts which make up the collection primarily explore the private lives and hidden desires of church-going Black woman. Set against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter and the turbulent landscape of contemporary America, they pick away at stereotypes and assumptions, depicting Black women as complex, strong and grounded in community. I particularly loved Dear Sister, an open letter from Nichelle to the sister she’s never met. Nichelle represents a group of women who share a disappointing, recently deceased father. Yet the story skips lightly over his failings, celebrating instead the sisterhood and success of these women, who’ve thrived within a warm, matriarchal community.
The tone could easily have become preachy or overearnest but Philyaw’s already a master of writing naturalistic, believable voices. Her characters tell their stories warts and all, and the effect is heartbreakingly humane. She favours an intimate first person which, given the tight focus upon women from quite similar backgrounds, could have become repetitive. However, each story feels memorable and distinct, from the gentle-mannered protagonist in How To Make Love to a Physicist who feels nervous about beginning a new relationship, to the forthright narrator of Instructions for Married Christian Husbands who sets out a list of rules for the married men she’s sleeping with, refusing to apologise for her brazenness.
Acidic wit
This is primarily a book about Black female American identity and, as such, is both timely and essential. However, the themes which Philyaw tackles will resonate with any woman who’s grown up in a community marked by religion and conservative values. With acidic wit and honesty, she explores class, gender, sexuality, ageing and religion. The context may be American but Philyaw’s church ladies have universal import. These are stories of dissent, where women, both subtly and with wilful aplomb, challenge the patriarchal constraints of their communities, question the more hypocritical aspects of both organised religion and the patriarchy, and ultimately demand the freedom to be themselves. In the opening story, Eula, we meet two church ladies, many years into a discrete but joyous affair. One would like to progress the relationship. The other, constrained by heteronormative notions of Christian marriage, views it as a kind of shameful distraction while she’s tracking down a suitable husband. The theme of sexual liberation is revisited in Jael, where a teenage girl – disturbingly named after an Old Testament women who hammered a tent peg through her husband’s skull – fantasises about her pastor’s wife as she takes vengeance on a lecherous older man. There’s a dark streak to many of Philyaw’s stories but it’s always tempered with humour and biting wit.
Unflinching look
My stand-out story was Peach Cobbler. Narrated by a young woman, whose mother is having a long-running affair with their pastor, it takes an unflinching look at poverty, class and the complex power structures at play within Black church communities. Here we see Philyaw at her most subtle, offering us a realistic, yet powerful snapshot of a young woman caught in a cycle of poverty and misogyny. She desperately wants a sweeter life, radically different from the crumbs her mother has existed on, yet hasn’t yet found a means of escape. She bakes a peach cobbler which isn’t to be offered to a man. In allowing herself to both eat and enjoy it, she takes a subtly defiant stance against the male-dominated world she’s been born into which always puts men’s needs first. This young woman is claiming the right to be happy, as all these church ladies are, in their own different ways. Philyaw’s collection is a defiant laugh in the face of dour religion and the men who use religion as a form of control.
