The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Product Information

That need for approval from the people we love – and the damage that can be caused when we don’t get it – is explored in Snowfall, one of the most heart-wrenching stories in the collection. Arletha, who lives with her partner, Rhonda, in Pittsburgh, desperately misses her mother and the south, where she’s from, but her family relationships were all but destroyed when she came out as gay. With characters that can touch you so immediately, it’s hardly surprising that the screen rights to Church Ladies have been snapped up by HBO – Philyaw is currently working on the script. Philyaw’s book is the winner of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Recently, it was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s 2021 Legacy Award, and it made the 2020 National Book Awards’ Shortlist for Fiction. She is also co-writing and co-producing (along with Tessa Thompson) an HBO Max adaptation. White, Peter (2021-01-15). "Tessa Thompson Launches Production Company With First-Look Deal At HBO/HBO Max, Will EP 'Who Fears Death' & 'The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies' Adaptations". Deadline . Retrieved 2021-01-20.

Throughout these stories we constantly watch women be good caregivers, good lovers, good people with gifts to share, and see them be squandered by a patriarchal society. ‘ Because he was a man who took without giving, he left us nothing to grieve,’ one narrator remarks. There are affairs with no thought to the women they will hurt, men who beat their wives to death in front of their infant children, or, as in Jael predatory men who even at the age of 35 prey on 15 year old girls. Philyaw pulls a reversal on the power dynamic in Instructions for Married Christian Husbands, a story sharp with satirical wit as a woman lays out her unbreakable rules for ‘ the infantilized husbands of accomplished godly women’ she sleeps with purely for pleasure and power. It is a fresh burst in the collection along with the rather adorable slow burn romance in Physicist. The combination of social stigmas, judgemental mothers and the Church all coalesce to make the women in these stories feel Othered or unable to comfortably occupy their own bodies. This is best detailed when a character has been made to wear a girdle her whole life by her mother, who finds it blasphemous when she arrives at church without one on after trying to learn to love herself in therapy sessions. The coached shame of ones body extends to their shame over sexuality or even feeling they are deserving of anything, much less love. The opening story, Eula, directly confronts the ways the Church’s insistence on purity is emotionally damaging. In it, two lifelong friends spend the last night of the 20th century together in a hotel and confront their sporadic sexual encounters with one another. Caroletta is hurt that Eula won’t admit her feelings and carries on in loveless relationships with men because she feels she must and because the Church sees their relations as unatural.

At forty-two, Lyra realizes that her discomfort with her own body stands between her and a new love. As Y2K looms, Caroletta’s “same time next year” arrangement with her childhood best friend is tenuous. A serial mistress lays down the ground rules for her married lovers. In the dark shadows of a hospice parking lot, grieving strangers find comfort in each other.

There are several women, however, who leap from that thin line of grace out to freedom in Deesha Philyaw's stunning first collection of stories, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Women (& girls) who for better or worse, know exactly who they are & refuse to give even a penny less. This is no mere collection of sappy romance stories. The love in Philyaw’s stories runs the gamut from sweet to bitter, sexy to sisterly, temporary to time tested, often with hidden aspects. The word secret in the title is earned, and some of the secrets are downright juicy.” a b c Banks, Adelle M. (2020-10-15). " 'The Secret Lives of Church Ladies' is finalist for National Book Award". richmondfreepress.com . Retrieved 2020-10-18.

Finalist, National Book Awards 2020 for Fiction

Philyaw shows the Church as another extension of patriarchy oppressing women as well as a too-rigid institution that shames people into compliance. This is echoed in How to Make Love to a Physicist as well: Sex, friendship, freedom, and agency are centered throughout this cheeky, insightful, and irresistible new book.”