Church Ladies, Writing, and Love: Deesha Philyaw

Love: Deesha Philyaw’s much-awaited collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies contains a myriad of facets of this basic human emotion. 

But don’t misunderstand me, 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 “Secrets” in the title is earned, and some of the secrets are downright juicy.

I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of the collection, and talking with Philyaw about love, writing, and church ladies.

-Tara Campbell, Barrelhouse editor

Tara Campbell (TC): Let’s start with the story in this special Barrelhouse edition, “How to Make Love to a Physicist.” What I love about it is that it’s both romantic and very real. Your protagonist meets a smart, sensitive scientist, but despite their mutual attraction and connection, her long-held insecurity about her body and her capacity for loving and being loved keeps holding her back. Most love stories present an external conflict the lovers must overcome, but you flip the script by giving us an internal conflict. Could you talk a little bit about what inspired this story—was the protagonist’s struggle for self-acceptance the starting point of this story for you, or did it bubble up through the writing?

Deesha Philyaw (DP): I must confess that a real-life, unrequited crush on a physicist was the starting point for this story! I also liked the geeky poetry of making love to a physicist on Pi Day. So I knew that's how the story would end for the fictional lovers, and then I worked backward from there. I imagined how they would meet and how the protagonist's church lady issues would complicate things for her and for them as a couple. Her struggle is common to me and so many women: This pressure to tame and train our bodies, literally and figuratively, as if they were somehow vulgar. That bleeds into how we see ourselves in the world as too much, as undeserving. 

This character, Lyra, is what I call church lady adjacent: There is a church lady in her life--in this case, her mother--who is very influential. And this colors how Lyra sees herself and how she treats herself.

TC: In both “How to Make Love to a Physicist” and “Instructions for Married Christian Husbands,” you experiment with section titles and modular storytelling. How do you decide on which form to use when writing a story?

DP: My approach varies and is subject to change, even after I've drafted the story. The draft that ultimately became "Instructions for Married Christian Husbands" started as a traditional narrative with scenes, focused on a main character and her involvement with one guy in particular. I wrote about 10 pages, but I just wasn't sure where to go with it, so I left it alone, for months. But then I got to the end of the manuscript for the collection, with the deadline looming, and I needed one more story. So I looked back at those 10 pages and still couldn't get excited about the story or the characters. I felt like, "So what?" But there was a section in that draft where the narrator is talking about these affairs she has, and she's basically describing it as ritual. She's also conveying her expectations. So I thought, What if I extended that? What if I played with it? What if she formalized these arrangements she has? What if she wrote the rules, literally?

TC: This collection doesn’t take a naïve view of relationships—they are complex, infidelity is a thing, women don’t only sleep with men, fathers aren’t always there for their children, and love doesn’t always lead to happiness. I admire how you take on the contradiction between how “church ladies” have been told love and marriage are supposed work, and how these concepts actually operate in the world. If there’s one character in one of your stories you wish you could talk some sense into, which one would it be—and do you think you could convince them?

DP: I love this question! I would try to talk some sense into Eula. I would tell her that "normal" is overrated. And that if she keeps half-living out of fear, she's going to look up one day and a lot of years will have passed her by. Years she could have filled with a lot more joy and a lot more honesty. She'll wish she could get that time back. But I don't think I'd be able to convince her. She's so certain about everything--this neat, black and white view of the world--and that's part of her undoing.

TC: How did this collection come together? Did you write with a central set of themes in mind, or did you find that this subject matter just kept popping up in your stories?

DP: Even before I started building the collection, the church ladies showed up in a novel that I've been working on for a really long time. I grew up in the church, and all those sermons, Sunday School classes, and Bible studies stuck with me. Even when I shifted gears from the novel and started writing short stories, the church ladies kept popping up. My agent heard one of the stories at a reading, and she said, "You're taking a break from the novel"--she's very diplomatic--"maybe you could put together a collection with these stories." I loved that idea. A collection felt far more possible than the novel that I was stuck on. So I continued writing stories, and I was intentional that they be about church ladies and how their desires put them at odds with the church's teachings, and what that meant for them and the people they cared about.

Once the collection was written, I realized that mothers and daughters is another theme that shows up throughout. This wasn't intentional. But I lost my mother to breast cancer in 2005, so she's always present.

TC: What’s next for you? Where can we hear you read, and what is your current writing obsession?

DP: On Valentine's Day, at the Moon Lit salon in DC, I'll be reading with some fantastic folks including Bassey Ikpi and Rion Amilcar Scott. That's going to be a fun night. Burlesque! Comedy! Prose! Poetry!
 

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies comes out September 2020. So I'm gearing up for that. And I'm back to working on my novel; that's my current obsession. I have so much more clarity about it now. Before, I was being too precious with my main character. And I'm playing with form, trying to make the whole thing epistolary. We'll see how that goes. 

Read “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” featured in the Love Issue

Deesha Philyaw’s writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, and elsewhere. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, her collection of short stories about Black women, sex, and the Black church, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press in fall 2020.