Summary
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is Deesha Philyaw's first collection of stories, nine of them, published by West Virginia University Press in September 2020. Every story centers Black women or girls raised in the church and caught between what they were taught in the pews and what they want. Philyaw grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, attending AME, Baptist and Pentecostal congregations among others, and her title borrows the name she heard as a child for the prim, carefully dressed women who never said a word out of line.
In "Eula," two lifelong friends and fellow churchgoers, both forty, meet in a motel room on New Year's Eve 1999, as they have for years. They have been friends since tenth grade and occasional lovers since Eula's thirtieth birthday; the narrator, Caroletta, wants Eula to admit they could be more than that, and Eula will not give up her dream of a traditional church life with a husband and a child. In "Peach Cobbler," Olivia remembers the pastor who came to the house when she was five, whom she took for God, and the long affair he carried on with her cold, withholding mother. In "How to Make Love to a Physicist," a middle school teacher goes into therapy, still taboo where she comes from, to work past the fears her rigid mother gave her and let herself fall for an unexpected man.
The stories are short, frank about sex, frequently funny, and they speak to one another: Publishers Weekly said they "inform and build on one another, turning her characters' private struggles into a beautiful chorus," and Kirkus put it plainly: "No saints exist in these pages." Not every piece lands; Publishers Weekly thought "Jael" lost force from its shifting viewpoints. At under two hundred pages it reads in an evening or two. It suits anyone who grew up in a church, or beside one, and knows the women in the front pews had lives the congregation never saw.
Historical Context & Significance
The collection won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, announced on April 6, 2021. The judges, Charles Finch, Bernice L. McFadden and Alexi Zentner, chose it from 419 eligible books and called it "a book that combines the curious agility of the best short fiction with the deep emotional coherence of a great novel." The other finalists were Matthew Salesses's Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, Rufi Thorpe's The Knockout Queen, Robin Wasserman's Mother Daughter Widow Wife and Steve Wiegenstein's Scattered Lights.
It had already been a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, won by Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown, and it also took the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Several publishers, the largest houses among them, had turned it down; it went on to sell about 30,000 copies in a little over six months, the most commercially successful book the press had ever published. In January 2021 Tessa Thompson's company, Viva Maude, announced an HBO Max series with Philyaw writing, joined that October by the writer Tori Sampson, when Deadline described the drama series as in development. Philyaw was a PEN/Faulkner judge in 2025.
Where to get it
We may earn a commission if you buy through these links, at no extra cost to you.
Opens WorldCat, a catalogue of library holdings run by the nonprofit OCLC. We do not ask for or receive your location.