The Afrinado Book Club is currently reading The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Filyaw. The collection of short stories follows the experiences of different black women living in the US and their various church adjacent lives. From the virgins till marriage that find themselves in an entanglement to the woman having a sordid affair with the town pastor.
Deesha Philyaw’s writing style
Deesha’s writing in this book is easy to read, almost like having a conversation, she draws you in with scintillating sentences like: ” I think the pastors wife was a freak before she got into the church” in the story Jael. She then leaves you with food for thought with the closing lines of the short story Peach Cobbler, “I swear my life won’t be anything like yours, because it will be sweet, and it won’t be crumbs”.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is as saucy as it gets and I guess delves into the double lives people tend to lead, church ladies not withstanding. There is the public persona that smiles and sits properly and then there’s the secret inner life that grapples with sin and secret longings.
Mother – Daughter relationships
It also has themes of family relationships especially between mother’s and daughter’s. Relationships that often clash with the daughter’s reality is vis-a-vis what the mother wants for her child. In Snowfall, Arletha’s mother is incensed that she has decided to live and love a woman and simply refers to her daughter’s girlfriend Rhonda as “some woman she met on the internet”.
Affairs are a common theme in the book as Philyaw explores good women who give into their most taboo desires despite they better judgement, I guess in search of comfort and sometimes healing. One such story is Not Daniel, where the grief of a mother’s cancer treatment drives to strangers into each other’s arms.
While the stories are not connected, they all share various themes and similarities. However, if you are looking for spiritual redemption, you will not find it here, I would have liked to see what that would look like in a fictional book.
A good read if you are looking for a book about women’s inner lives.
The book is set to be adapted into a HBO series produced by Tessa Thompson.