JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
What is a Proverbs 31 wife? If you grew up in the church, like author Deesha Philyaw and I did, this might sound familiar to you.
DEESHA PHILYAW: The Proverbs 31 woman has always been held up as the epitome of Christian womanhood. She's basically a virtuous workhorse.
SUMMERS: Philyaw is the author of the new novel "The True Confessions Of First Lady Freeman." And First Lady Freeman, or Scharisse, is not your typical pastor's wife. She's married to the leader of a fictional Black megachurch in Georgia, but Scharisse is profane. She revels in sex and pleasure, and she's also grappling with a deeply buried secret about her family. And when I talked with Deesha Philyaw, I wanted to know so much more about Schar and her position as a first lady.
PHILYAW: She's a bit of a savant (laughter) .
SUMMERS: Yeah. For sure.
PHILYAW: And so, you know, she stepped into that role, and she's a good girl scout. So she learned to kind of go through the paces, but she has her own questions about faith that she keeps to herself. And so the optics are what she really leans into until a scandal breaks, and it forces her hand, so to speak. And so 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.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
PHILYAW: We're performing a certain role. And, ultimately, trying to get free of these performances and these hoops we're jumping through is - it comes at a cost. But I hope that people take away that whatever it costs to get free and to be true to yourself, it's worth it.
SUMMERS: Now, from learning more about your background, I realize that you and I have something in common. We were both raised by our mothers and grandmothers, both raised in the church. How did that experience shape the story?
PHILYAW: I grew up watching women inside the church and outside of the church. Because my mother and my grandmother - they sent me to church, but they didn't go themselves. So that was the beginning of these kind of conflicting messages about who I could become or who I should become, how I should live as a Black girl, and later as a Black woman, under sort of the cloak of the church's very binary, very controlling restrictions around - specifically, for women - the hypocrisies and all of those things. So for a kid, I was very curious and also very confused about how to be in the world. I wanted to be good. I didn't want to go to hell, and that's (laughter) how it was portrayed.
SUMMERS: Right. Yeah.
PHILYAW: You know, you're good or bad, Madonna/whore, heaven or hell. And it looked like the women outside of the church were having a lot more fun, but they were going to go to hell. So what did that mean for me? And of course, I grew into a more mature thinking about that. But as I got older and married and had my own family and still wasn't happy. I did everything right, according to the church, and I wasn't happy. And so I first explored that dissatisfaction in fiction. I wasn't bold enough to write nonfiction about that. So I gave those fears and those concerns to my women characters who were a lot like the women that I grew up watching in church.
SUMMERS: I have to say, I'm - no longer consider myself religious, but I've spent a lot of time thinking about the ways in which the church still impacts my life, especially, like, the ways I think about marriage, interpersonal relationships, family. How does that still show up for you all these years later?
PHILYAW: I'm obsessed with it in my fiction...
SUMMERS: (Laughter).
PHILYAW: ...Because it's exactly what you said. You can leave the church. But as I joke sometimes, you know, the pastor and your mama are still in your bedroom.
SUMMERS: Oh, man.
(LAUGHTER)
PHILYAW: Right? And so it wasn't very hard for me. I'm very grateful. I know a lot of women who struggle a lot more trying to - folks are calling it now deconstruct religion, whether they actually walk away from the church or not. But really understanding how we were so young when this sort of indoctrination happened, telling us, you know, who we could be and teaching us not to trust our bodies and to think that pleasure was wrong. Everything we learned about sex was upside down and inside out.
And so, for me, personally, it's - I love - through my fiction - trying to reclaim some of that and tell stories and imagining what it's like for different women and different girls to decide that they want to shake free of that, and what does that require? Or, conversely, if they try to follow the church and stay bound by the fear and the guilt and the shame that the church has used as measures of control - what does it cost them to stay mired in that? I'm endlessly curious about that.
SUMMERS: I don't want to give away any spoilers, but we see Schar get pulled in so many different directions in this book to do what one might say is the right thing. But she seems to be the most compelled to do right by her daughter, and that seems to be sort of her guiding light. Can you talk about that relationship?
PHILYAW: Yes. One of the changes that happened, as this character and as this book evolved - it was initially very centered on her marriage. And 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. And so I wanted to revise the direction of the book so that the primary relationships, in addition to Schar being in alignment with herself, is with her best friend, Petra, and her daughter, Gabrielle.
And so Gabrielle is looking at Schar the way I said I was looking at church women. Like, well, who am I going to become? - and asking really hard questions of her mother. And Schar has to contend with, you know, even if she wants to lie to herself, she can't lie to her daughter. And so as this scandal is playing out, she has to make certain decisions. And her daughter is there - sort of like her conscious - calling her out when she knows that the things that her mother is doing and saying are not right, even if she's trying to do them for the right - what she thinks are the right reasons.
SUMMERS: I have to say - one of the biggest things I took away from this book when I was reading it is that marriage is just really, really messy. What were you trying to say about marriage with this book, particularly marriage and its relationship to religion?
PHILYAW: Yes. So I've been divorced twice (laughter), so I could just end the answer there, but I won't. But, you know, the church sets marriage up as the only structure in which sex is allowed, heterosexual marriage. And so it's this very elevated institution, but we know that, again, that's just patriarchy. That's not necessarily of God.
And so, even though I wanted to decenter the marriage in Schar's life so it's not the most important institution, I did want to address how we often believe. Because we've been taught that marriage is the thing that's going to save us, or marriage is the thing that's going to complete us. But instead, as you observed, it's something else to grapple with. It's potentially another set of problems when you're seeking to combine your life with someone else's who perhaps doesn't always have your best interest in mind.
SUMMERS: Deesha Philyaw is the author of "The True Confessions Of First Lady Freeman." Thanks so much.
PHILYAW: Thank you.
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