Sex, friendship, freedom, and agency are centered throughout this cheeky, insightful, and irresistible new book.” Snowfall” (74) follows Arletha and Rhonda, a couple living in an unnamed Northern city. As the story opens they are clearing snow from their driveway one morning. Both characters grew up in the South, but they lost their family connections there because both of their mothers disapprove of their homosexuality, Rhonda’s more so than Artletha’s. They are struggling to adapt to the culture and winter climate of the city, and Arletha misses the South. After clearing the snow, Arletha takes Rhonda to work. Arletha later slips on ice, hurts herself, and almost calls her mother. She stops herself and calls Rhonda, who is unsympathetic when Arletha tells her what happened because she is bitter about not being able to communicate with her own mother. Rhonda later apologizes and makes boiled crabs, a meal that reminds Arletha of home, and the two reconcile. The subtitle to this one could have easily been WHERE THE BOYS AREN'T, so a heads-up to male readers: you may not want to go here, unless you finally want to understand why we so often hate you. Who Fears Deathtells the coming of age tale of Onyesowu in post-apocalyptic North Africa where her story makes her an outcast. She must go on a journey from self-reproach to love, but to do so she’ll have to overcome untold obstacles—defeating her hated sorcerer father and becoming the instrument of prophetic deliverance for a land of oppressed people, all the while fighting to master the terrifying powers growing inside her. The epistolary style of “Dear Sister” is a great way to show the different effects an absent/neglectful father can have upon his daughters, even into their adulthoods. It's told with enough hope, humor, and love among other relatives that it’s not too dark, and still realistic.

a b Snowden, Jordan. "Book Review: Deesha Philyaw's The Secret Lives of Church Ladies". Pittsburgh City Paper . Retrieved 2020-10-18. My two favorite short stories included "Peach Cobbler" and "How to Make Love to a Physicist." The former involves a young girl whose mother is having an affair with their church's preacher, and how she must decide how much to accept or reject her mother's example. The latter includes a woman slowly turning toward romantic love even after having been hurt in the past. I liked how both stories highlighted the ways in which our histories influence our relationships, as well as our agency to change course even when it feels hard. White, Peter (2021-10-05). "Tori Sampson Boards Tessa Thompson & HBO Max's 'The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies', Will Write & EP With Deesha Philyaw". Deadline . Retrieved 2021-10-20. I want to ring in the New Year in Times Square someday,” Eula says, but her words are kind of mashed up because of the André.

Finalist, National Book Awards 2020 for Fiction

Mayer, Petra (2020-10-06). "Charles Yu, Kacen Callender Among National Book Award Finalists". NPR.org . Retrieved 2020-10-18. Peach Cobbler,” arguably the most gripping story, follows the mother-daughter relationship between Olivia and her mother, who prepares a peach cobbler for God every Monday. Olivia soon reveals that it’s not God for whom her mother bakes the cobbler, but her married pastor, who she once believed was the deity until she saw his humanity for what it was—fallible. Olivia’s mother chooses to put all her energy in pleasing and loving this man at the cost of neglecting her daughter, who isn’t allowed to eat the cobbler. Watching her mother make the dessert, Olivia thinks: “I wanted to be those peaches. I longed to be handled by caring hands. And if I couldn’t, I wanted the next best thing: to make something so wonderful with my own hands.” O'Driscoll, Bill. "Pittsburgh-Based Author Explores 'The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies' ". www.wesa.fm . Retrieved 2020-10-18. Caroletta, I hope you haven’t given up on finding you a husband. I’m on a mission, and you can be too.” Eula sounds flat, like the world’s most exhausted saleslady. She scoots away from me to the edge of the bed, looking at the TV. How to Make Love to a Physicist” (94) is written in the second person. The narration follows a pattern of answering the repeating question “How do you make love to a physicist?” (95). The protagonist, framed as “you,” is Lyra James, who falls in love with Eric, a man she meets at a STEAM conference. The story follows the beginning of her romantic relationship with Eric as she struggles to overcome body shame and negative feelings from past relationships. It ends with Eric and Lyra meeting again and spending the night together.

I look at Eula, her no-longer-fresh ringlets damp from the time spent between my legs. As I think about her question, something both cruel and pitiful churns inside me and threatens to spill out. Since when does she know or care anything about my happiness? Anything at all about it? a b Owusu, Nadia (2021-05-17). "One Book Nearly Swept This Year's Awards. Why Didn't Publishers Want It?". Slate Magazine . Retrieved 2021-10-20.On the TV, the Times Square crowd is going wild. It’s almost time for the countdown. Eula and I are lying in the bed wearing only our year 2000 glasses. The noisemakers are still in the bag. Jael” (113) is narrated in alternating sections by a teenager named Jael and her great-grandmother and guardian, Granny. Granny begins reading Jael’s diary and finds that she is sexually attracted to women, specifically their church pastor’s wife. As Granny continues reading Jael’s diary and thinks about how to save her from a life of sin, Jael spends time with her friend Kachelle and Kachelle’s much-older boyfriend, Jamie, a sexual predator who Jael eventually murders by causing a gas leak in his house. Granny finds out about this event via Jael’s diary. Granny considers that Jamie was a bad man, thinks to herself that killing is still a sin, and worries about Jael being caught by the police. 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: Deesha Philyaw’s collection of nine stories about church ladies is fresh, tender, biting, raw, deeply moving and just downright beautiful. I think there was a moment I was holding my breath while reading a story and I could only release after finishing. These stories beg to be read, and be read widely.

My mother’s peach cobbler was so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife,’ opens the story Peach Cobbler, a standout of the collection featuring a girl coming of age and faced with the infidelities of her mother and their preacher, and a ripe example of Philyaw’s excellence in tone and aim—and frequent and effective use of food in the stories. For God is everywhere in these stories, or at least those who use God to enforce their ideas of polite society on others. Each story is overflowing with guilt of ‘ how something can feel right and wrong at the same time,’ with characters simply wanting to occupy their own sexuality and desires but made to feel lesser than for them. This is particularly true in the multiple stories featuring lesbian relationships, such as in Snowfall. This story that starts with a young couple begrudgingly shoveling snow having moved to the midwest from Florida captured my heart as I myself had been shoveling snow moments before reading it and is one of the most tender stories in the collection despite the shadow of abandonment from mothers due to being in a relationship with another woman. When she says amen, I get up and walk to the foot of the bed and kneel down. Eula’s toenails are painted the same pink as her scarf. I reach for her ankles and pull her toward me. She scoots on her butt until she’s at the edge, her feet flat on the bed on either side of me. She spreads her knees apart. I push down gently on the inside of her thighs, until she is open, like an altar. Another “kernel” of her own life in Church Ladies is Philyaw’s identity as a queer woman, a label she has only just started to use. Despite “queer” feeling more accurate than “straight” in terms of her desires and life experiences, she was reluctant to use the word. “I felt like I was claiming something that I had no right to claim, because I had all of these privileges and protections, having been married to men twice.” She recently sought “permission” to call herself queer from LGBT+ friends and family. “They reminded me that I don’t have to answer to anybody.”It was during a break from the difficult work of novel writing that Church Ladies started to come together. Philyaw had written short fiction in response to competitions and call-outs and hadn’t noticed that her stories tended to share a common theme. It was only when her agent started to refer to them as “church lady stories” that she realised she had been subconsciously zooming in on the questions of her childhood. The men in this book are like garnish: they’re on the plate, but they’re not the meal In Snowfall, Arletha has relocated from Florida to an inhospitably colder climate up north with her girlfriend Rhonda. Despite being rejected and nearly disowned by her churchgoing mother due to her sexuality, Arletha’s thoughts turn to home.

DP: I love a good crab boil. I get the blue crabs when I’m in Maryland. There are nine stories [in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies], and two of them mention crab boils. There were the ways we talked to and about each other. When each of the characters spoke, I could hear them. I could hear my grandmother in the older characters, which were some of my favorite characters to write. Like Granny in my story “Jael,” even though neither my grandmother nor great-grandmother were religious. I can hear other older people as they were quoting the Bible, but there were certain rhythms and reflections and things that my grandmother would say and the way she reacted to things. I thought, “That was totally my grandmother.” I can still hear her voice, and she’s been gone since 2005.This compact, darling of a collection that fit so nicely in my hand reminded me so much of my all-time favorite collection of short fiction, J.D. Salinger's Nine Stories. Not in theme, tone, or time-period, but in its execution. The relationship between women and their mothers are also at the center of this collection,usually fraught with familial tension and often with the daughters being caregivers to their aging mothers such as in Not-Daniel and When Eddie Levert Comes’ The latter is especially effective as the daughter is merely called Daughter despite each other character having a name. The book is West Virginia University Press's most commercially successful in its history. It sold 30,000 copies in six months. [6] Critical reception [ edit ] 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.