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Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies which was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and for The Story Prize (2020/2021). The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church.
Deesha, welcome to Brown Girl Book Lover.
LM: In the collection, we see secrets create a sense of loneliness and displacement within the characters. Why was this important to explore?
Deesha: You know the characters are hiding things from themselves and others, and this creates a kind of loneliness because the real you is not "the you" out in the world. The real you is alone. When these characters are confined and constricted, it puts them in a lonely place because they aren’t able to explore and celebrate themselves.
LM: Do you think many people are attracted to your book because they feel that sense of loneliness and displacement?
Deesha: There are so many themes in my book that are relatable. It’s the loneliness, the mother-daughter stuff, the longing, the displacement, and fighting against binaries. It’s exciting and hopefully affirming when you can read a story that speaks to your sense of isolation and what you are grappling with. I wrote this book for black women, but I knew that people who aren’t black women could also access this book because the idea of getting free of secrets, free of our family’s expectations is a universal concept.
LM: When reading the stories, I noticed the places where the characters reside are not named, but we still got a firm emotional mapping of their world. Why did you choose not to give specific locations about the setting for each story?
Deesha: I didn’t think it was necessary to give a specific place to make the story more expansive because the women are the world, they are the center. It does not matter where the stories are located, the dynamics and the pressures the characters endured are the same.
LM: You said you wrote your book for black women. Why is it important to write your book for black women, and for them to be seen and heard?
Deesha: The narratives have controlled how black women are viewed, and to some extent how we view ourselves. You know narrative is how slavery was justified. You can stay these people aren’t people, then you can justify enslaving them. You can say these women aren’t women, then you can justify raping them. The narrative of who we have always been distorted. I like telling stories from our perspective through our gaze only.
LM: Lastly, at Brown Girl Book Lover, we celebrate diverse writers and their voices in the literary world, how does our society benefit from diverse voices?
Deesha: It goes back to the narratives. This country was built on lies and when you have diverse voices telling their own stories, you are correcting the historical record. You are correcting the lie at the foundation of our story, and diverse voices bring about that reckoning that needs to happen. That’s long overdue.
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