Deesha Philyaw's first book took a long road to readers. According to the Orange County Register, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was rejected by major publishing houses before West Virginia University Press picked it up. The collection went on to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Story Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and it was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Her second book had a longer road still. The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, her debut novel, was published on September 29, and Philyaw has spent the week since explaining, in interviews with NPR, Electric Literature, Marie Claire and others, why it took two decades to finish.
A first lady with a secret
The novel's narrator is Scharisse Freeman, who, as Electric Literature put it, went from "rags-to-Rolex" by marrying a megachurch pastor. The church is fictional and set in Georgia. Schar is snubbed by the other pastors' wives and estranged from her childhood friend Petra. When she is invited to compete in the First Lady USA Pageant, a secret from her past surfaces and a scandal follows.
On NPR, Philyaw told the host Juana Summers that the book is about the roles people play. "I wanted to write about the Black church, in particular, but I think it's true for a lot of us, that sometimes we're performing our lives," she said. She hopes readers come away believing "that whatever it costs to get free and to be true to yourself, it's worth it."
Fourteen years in, a change of tone
Philyaw started the book in 2006. She told Marie Claire that she began it while "churchy and miserable," as a story about a pastor's wife who was ambivalent about Christianity. She set it aside and wrote the stories that became Church Ladies. When she came back to it, she decided the novel had to be a satire.
"The sex was always there, but I decided to make the novel satirical at the 14-year mark, in 2020," she told the Orange County Register. "Originally, Scharisse was very earnest, self-pitying, and passive. I didn't like that."
She credited an online satire workshop she took around that time, and a lesson she attributed to George Saunders. "You have to really know and have some affection for what you're critiquing, otherwise it's just sneering," she told Marie Claire. "I didn't want to sneer at the church. I wanted to skewer the unchecked misogyny, patriarchy, hypocrisy, sexual double standards, abuse, and violence in the church."
"I didn't want to sneer at the church."
From the marriage to the women around it
The other big revision was in what the book is about. "It was initially very centered on her marriage," Philyaw told NPR. "As I got older, and as I evolved, I realized, you know, that's a mistake to center men, to center romantic relationships over our other relationships." The finished novel puts Schar's relationships with Petra and with her daughter, Gabrielle, at the center instead.
Petra, she told Electric Literature, "was there from the beginning," and has always been queer. "I love that the queer relationship is the healthiest relationship in the book," she said.
The novel also plays with form. Philyaw told the Register that the script-like dialogue, footnotes and emails were not part of her outline. "The forms are really a map of how my brain works," she said, adding, "I get bored easily."
She finished the final draft, she said, in the lobby of a hotel in her hometown, Jacksonville, Florida.
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw (Mariner Books) was published September 29. Sources: NPR, Electric Literature, Marie Claire, Orange County Register.
Reported by the RedSquibble books desk from the publications and announcements linked in this story.
