Writer Mother Monster

Writer Mother Monster: Deesha Philyaw, “We think the worst thing is for our kids to feel unloved if we’re not there, but the worst is if we’re not there for ourselves; if we don’t show up for what we’re passionate about, to have unrealized dreams as a mot

May 07, 2021 Lara Ehrlich Season 1 Episode 25
Writer Mother Monster
Writer Mother Monster: Deesha Philyaw, “We think the worst thing is for our kids to feel unloved if we’re not there, but the worst is if we’re not there for ourselves; if we don’t show up for what we’re passionate about, to have unrealized dreams as a mot
Show Notes Transcript

(May 6, 2021) Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award in fiction and won The Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. Her children are 17 and 22, and she describes writer-motherhood as “intense, complex, evolving.” In this episode, Deesha talks about starting her writing career when her daughter was 2, what she learned from sending fan mail to other writers, revisiting an abandoned novel, and how she ended her award-winning collection with a sigh.

Writer Mother Monster is a conversation series devoted to dismantling the myth of having it all and offering writer-moms solidarity, support, and advice as we make space for creative endeavors.

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Writer Mother Monster: Deesha Philyaw

May 6, 2021

 

 

Deesha Philyaw‘s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, and many other publications. She is the mother of two children, ages 17 and 22, and she describes writer-motherhood as “intense, complex, evolving.”

 

 

Lara Ehrlich

Hello, and welcome to Writer Mother Monster. I’m your host, Lara Ehrlich, and our guest tonight is Deesha Philyaw. Thank you all for tuning in. Please remember to chat with us during the interview, so we can weave in your comments and questions. And if you enjoy the episode, please also become a patron or patroness to help keep this podcast going. I’m excited to introduce Deesha Philyaw. Deesha’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; the collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. Deesha is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, and many other publications. She is the mother of two children, ages 17 and 22, and she describes writer-motherhood as “intense, complex, evolving.” Please join me in welcoming Deesha. Welcome.

 

Deesha Philyaw

Hey, Lara, how are you?

 

Lara Ehrlich

Great, how are you?

 

Deesha Philyaw

Good, thank you.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me first about these three words that you’ve used to describe writer-motherhood.

 

Deesha Philyaw

Well intense, because, you know, I have to own it: I’m intense, and my children are intense. They probably would say they’re not intense, but they’re intense. So, you’ve got three intense women, and that just sort of colors everything we do. We have fun, but there is a level of intensity that we all can bring to situations. Complex—same thing. Mothering is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Hands down. I think it’s the hardest thing I’ll ever do. Individually, we’re complex human beings, and we are these systems of needs and desires and quirks, and then you put these systems in each other’s orbit, and you are trying to figure it out. And we’re at different stages of our lives—children are going through their stages, and we as moms are going through our own stages. There’s a lot happening all at once. That’s the complexity. The last word was “evolving.” When people ask, “Does it get easier?” I tell them, “It gets different.” And that’s the evolution of it. It’s always changing—different things to worry about, different things to enjoy.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Did you ask other moms that question when you first became a mother? Does it get easier?

 

Deesha Philyaw

I don’t remember asking that. I was really lucky in that I found this group of really great moms online whose children were older than mine. I was pregnant, and they all had older kids. They were all homeschoolers, because I thought I was gonna homeschool at that time, so I spent my entire pregnancy in these virtual conversations with them, so I could see them at different stages. I always heard, you know, “the terrible twos.” I knew about that. And then they would be talking about the things that were unique to 3 and then 4, and then this thing that happens at 7 and then 10, and I was like, so basically, what you’re telling me is that it never ends. Then there’s parenting an adult, which I’m doing now, which is its own experience. So yeah, I didn’t ask that specific question, but I’ve always been watching other mothers.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Did you always know you wanted to be a mother?

 

Deesha Philyaw

Yes. That was always part of the plan.

 

Lara Ehrlich

I thought I would never want to be a mother, so it took me by surprise when I realized I wanted to be. Tell me a little bit more about having always wanted to be a mother. Why did you have that desire?

 

Deesha Philyaw

I think for the same reason that I thought you get married, you go to college—it was just the things that you do. I thought it was what makes your life complete. I was raised by my mother and my grandmother, and my mother was a single mom. I watched a lot of television as a kid, and I sort of bought into the notion of a normal family as a nuclear family. And I had some shame around the fact that I didn’t have that kind of family, so I always wanted to have that nuclear family with me as the mom. That was always in the plan.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me a little bit more about growing up. What was your own mother like?

 

Deesha Philyaw

My mother was intense. She has since passed away, but I think if she heard me say that, she would say, “I’m not intense.” She’s totally intense. And she was absolutely devoted to me. I knew every second of my life with her that I was loved. But it was suffocating, at a certain point. There are some bits and pieces of my mother and me in my collection of stories. There’s a line where the one character in a snowfall is describing her mother’s love like a blanket. In the summer, it’s suffocating. But then when you need it, you miss it. And that’s kind of how it was with my mom. She could be a little too much. She was also very critical, and that really shaped me in a lot of ways. There’s a lot of unlearning and healing I had to do. It was this sort of complexity of being absolutely loving and devoted, but she would have nitpicked me to death, if I had not eventually created some boundaries with her.

 

Lara Ehrlich

How did that relationship set up your expectations for motherhood?

 

Deesha Philyaw

Well, like a lot of people, it’s like, “I’m never gonna do that” or “I’m never gonna say that.” I think it gave me a false sense of my power as a mother. Kids are not widgets. You can’t just put in inputs and get guaranteed outputs, like, “Okay, here’s this list of things that my mother did that I wish she hadn’t, and here’s this list of things she did that were wonderful and I’m gonna do all the wonderful things and not gonna do the horrible things.” You still have challenges, there’s still things that I did that I wish I wouldn’t have done or things my kids wanted me to do that I didn’t. There’s no perfect mothering. 

 

So, it gave me a blueprint, because there are some things that I did right. I think it’s important for us to remember as mothers. It’s very easy to focus on where we dropped the ball as parents, but to think about the things we did right: my mother’s being devoted to me and treating me like a person, that my needs were important, that I felt loved. My mother was demonstrating things that I took for granted. It was easy for me in parenting my own kids to hug and be tender with my children. I got that from my mother and did that in my own mothering. 

 

The inverse was true, which was really listening to them. And this has been really hard. I thought it would be easy, because my mother seemed to chafe against the fact that I was a separate person, and she took my doing things differently as a criticism of her and how she did things. I just thought, you know, whatever my kids do, as long as it’s not harmful, I’m not gonna have anything to say. I want them to be their own person. And now I see that desire to want them to do things a certain way. It’s picking my battles, you know. My mother never picked her battles. Everything was a battle with her. And so I’m learning to say less, and my kids would probably say, “Really? Because you say a lot.” But they have no idea how much I keep things to myself when I want to say something. I’m trying not to nitpick.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Well, especially as they are getting older—17 and 22, I imagine, are the ages at which they’re starting to make choices that you really would like to nitpick.

 

Deesha Philyaw

Yes. Absolutely. Just letting them, as we say, “learn things the hard way.” They have to make mistakes. That’s the hardest thing to watch. I have to step back. There’s a time and place to speak and say, “I’ve been there,” or, “Here’s a perspective I have because I’m older. I’m going to give it to you. You do with it what you will.” As opposed to putting down the hammer, which, at a certain point, you just can’t. You can make suggestions, but they’re their own people.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, and they’re born as their own people, aren’t they?

 

Deesha Philyaw

Yeah.

 

Lara Ehrlich

How did having children change you as a writer?

 

Deesha Philyaw  

I started writing when my oldest daughter was 2, and she didn’t nap. So, I’ve been a mother longer than I’ve been a writer by a couple of years. It started incrementally. Writing was something that I did as an escape and as a solace for myself, because I was a stay-at-home mom and was 24/7 taking care of my daughter. I carved out that little bit of time each day, and then it started to expand over time. One thing that being a mother taught me was that time is precious, to not waste time, and find writing time where I can. 

 

Then, over the years, having children forces you to ask, “What are your stories to tell and what are not your stories to tell?” And where your story is inter-lapped with someone else, be it a parent or a child—how do you negotiate and navigate those lines? I’ve written about my mother, I’ve written about my children, and it was always trying to figure out where my story ended and theirs started—and then still getting it wrong. I wrote about them extensively when they were much younger, when I was early in my writing career, and there are things now that I regret that I wrote about—not specific stories or anything, but just in general, if we’re serious about the concept of consent. They thought it was fun that I wrote about them, but as minors, they didn’t understand the magnitude of what was happening, and so they couldn’t give me consent. If I call myself a writer, and I do, I could have done a better job of figuring out how to write about motherhood without doing it in a way that now feels like I kind of violated their privacy.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of other writer mothers on the show talk about that line between your story and how it intersects with your children’s stories, and what the line is between yours and theirs. It sounds as though you’re saying that that line evolves, or constantly moves, and you have to figure out where it is.

 

Deesha Philyaw

Yeah, so I’ll give you an example. My younger daughter is adopted, so I wrote extensively about that. I had a whole column at Literary Mamacalled “The Girl Is Mine,” and it was all about being an adoptive mom. 

 

When she was around 12, she was interested in doing a DNA test, and again, I asked her permission, but you know, she’s 12. I said, “May I write about why you want to do this test and also about me as your mother, knowing that you’re trying to find out as much as you can about your biological roots?” I think I was doing a really good job of respecting that line, and the editor was like, “Wow, there’s just something missing.” I was like, “Yeah, there’s a whole person missing. It’s my kid. I’m trying to respect that. I’m trying to tell the part of this that is my story.” But it just wasn’t working. The editor was saying to talk to her about certain things. I reached out to my daughter and said, “This is what I’m writing, this is what’s happening, would you be interested in writing this with me?” Then it became an alternating narrative, and we did it that way.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Wow. Tell me a little bit about writing with your daughter. Was that the first time you’d done that?

 

Deesha Philyaw

Yeah. I just told her I would send her a paragraph and ask her to write whatever she wanted to say after that, to write it in response to what I’d written. I would say I’m wondering about whatever, and then she would respond in her paragraph, and then I’d write something else, and it was wonderful, because I could relax a little bit and feel less like I was … cannibalizing is too strong a word, but it felt more right. And it was a better story, of course.

 

Lara Ehrlich

It’s fascinating to hear you say that there’s something missing, and then to problem solve how to address what that was in a creative way, just from a craft perspective.

 

Deesha Philyaw

Yeah.

 

Lara Ehrlich

We have a comment from Danielle Boursiquot. Hi, Danielle. She says, “It’s interesting to hear your thoughts on permission.” She thinks parents have an innate feeling of ownership of their children that sometimes that sometimes never evolves. What do you think about that?

 

Deesha Philyaw

That’s a benefit of my mother parenting me the way she did. I chafed against that. My mother definitely felt not so much that she owed me, but we were the same person, or I was just an extension of her. And I hated all of that and everything about it. That was one of those, I’m never going to treat my children as just an extension of myself, I don’t own them, they are their own person. And not only do I need to do that for a healthy set of boundaries and relationship with them, but that’s how I want them to engage the rest of the world. I want them to feel like they belong to themselves and that they have agency, and we don’t want our children to feel beholden to other people. We can model that in the beginning by letting them know you’re not even beholden to me, as your parent; you belong to yourself.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, I think that’s such an important lesson to learn. Especially, I would think, for young women.

 

Deesha Philyaw  

Yes.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Let’s go back for a second to your fledgling writing career. Because as we saw in your bio, this has been quite a year for you. You’ve won, literally, probably every award for a debut book and the top prizes for short story collections. Tell me a little bit about the beginning of writing, when your child was 2. Was that literally when you came to writing, or had you written anything before that point?

 

Deesha Philyaw

No, I mean, I had to write in school, and I enjoyed it, but I never thought about writing as a career. It didn’t seem practical. I was drawn to it as a form of escape. It felt good to write, and it was something that I could do for myself. I was initially writing fiction. I didn’t think about the characters as church ladies, even though they were, because I was really mining my memories and my nostalgia of growing up in the South and being in church a lot. Those women really loomed large for me. But I didn’t think of them as church ladies. They were just dissatisfied women. I was dissatisfied in my own life, but I wasn’t comfortable writing nonfiction, so I gave that dissatisfaction to these characters. 

 

I tried my hand at novel writing, and a couple of novels just kind of crashed and burned. The third one really had legs. I started that one in 2007. I got about two thirds of the way done with that, and it also stalled. I really lost interest in the character as I had written her. There were really no high stakes, and I wasn’t interested in her problems or what she wanted, but I kept trying to write it without that awareness. It took finishing my collection to realize, oh, I don’t care about that stuff anymore. 

 

I kept trying to write a novel I had started a decade earlier. I started changing the character a little bit over the years, but I had changed so much, so what was interesting to me in 2007 certainly wasn’t interesting to me a decade later. Once I finished this collection, I understood what was going on with that novel, but the novel was stalling. 

 

I started writing these short stories, and I had an agent for the co-parenting book, who was ready to see a novel. She was like, “We can do this.” She’d also heard me read some of the short stories, so when she saw that I was not making any headway with the novel, she said, “You know, I like these church lady stories. Maybe you could get intentional about that and build a collection of stories around these things: Black women, sex in the Black church.” And I was like, “That sounds doable.” She even broke it down further and said, “If you can write three stories, get them published, we’ll have a partial manuscript I can pitch and shop around.” That felt more doable than “finish that novel that you started all those years ago.” And so that’s how the collection came to be. That’s kind of the arc of my fiction life. 

 

But I had so many detours, because I had to make a living. I could make a living writing and editing, or I could write nonfiction, I could write personal essays—I was getting published to do that sort of thing. Writing for public, for nonprofits and companies and doing work that wasn’t creative—that’s how I paid the bills. And fiction was always like, “I’m gonna get back to it, I’m gonna get back to it.” It was when I could steal time. Then in 2016, I took a corporate job, and that gave me the financial stability and freed up more time, actually, for me to write fiction. That’s when I finished the collection. Then I left in 2019, and I’m back to just writing.

 

Lara Ehrlich

I think that’s an amazing arc, and one that makes me feel hopeful, and hopefully, a lot of women who are listening right now feel hopeful that just because you abandon a novel doesn’t mean that you’re not a writer, right?

 

Deesha Philyaw

That’s right.

 

Lara Ehrlich

And if you have a corporate job or a job that’s not in writing, that doesn’t mean that you’re not a writer. It can, in fact, help you become a writer, or to dedicate yourself more to your writing, when you’re not worried about how you’re going to pay your bills.

 

Deesha Philyaw

Exactly.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Tell me a little bit about the craft side and how you developed your craft. Once you started writing, what did you do to write a novel?

 

Deesha Philyaw

I did a couple of things. The first was really dorky, which was, I wrote to writers. Like, if I read a book, and I liked it, I figured out how to write to that writer and send them, like, the dorkiest fan mail and just ask really general questions. Like, “I want to be a writer. Do you have any advice for me?” And people would write back, which is great. It was really nice of them, because, again, very dorky. I learned a lot by asking that question. 

 

I also read a lot of books on craft, and I never went back for an MFA. I have a bachelor’s in economics, and I have a master’s in teaching. I just never felt like going back to school for another degree, so I would take classes everywhere—classes, conferences, retreats, workshops. But Literary Mama was definitely a big part of my writing education. I wrote the column there for four years, I think every month or every other month. 

 

We were all edited by two editors, which was a fantastic education. There were about a dozen columnists, and we would edit each other, as we had time. I learned a lot through the experience of editing other people’s work. That was really helpful.

 

And then, just finding writing communities, finding writing buddies, people who could be my readers. You know, you need your champions. It’s like your mom putting your stuff on the refrigerator. People who are gonna cheer you on, no matter what. But in addition to those people—and sometimes it’s the same people, but not always—you need readers who can love you enough to tell you the truth and not just blow smoke up your ass. To tell you when something isn’t great and how you can make it great, or if it’s good, how you can make it great. People who have the skill to give you that kind of feedback. I started building that network and building those relationships.

 

Lara Ehrlich

You said you went to conferences and workshops and things. Let’s talk about the logistics of that. Where did you steal the time from to do that?

 

Deesha Philyaw

You know, the funny thing about divorce—I’ve had this experience, and I’ve heard it from other women—is that it’s sad, but sometimes you get more time, once you get divorced, because you have a set schedule of when the kids are going to be with their other parent, and you can plan things, as opposed to what happens for a lot of us, when you’re under the same roof, you are just the default parent, always on call, on duty. Shout out to my co-parent. He’s always been a hands-on father, so that was never an issue for us. If anything, with me, it was being able to pull myself away. 

 

Over time, I started being able to do that. But a lot of times, I had to leave the house to do it. Once we split up, I knew which days I didn’t have my kids, I knew which weekends I didn’t have my kids, and I could actually be present with my writing in the same way that when my kids are with me, I could be present with them. I know that that’s not always the case for mothers that either don’t have a partner that prioritizes us getting a break, or sometimes we treat the other parent like a secondary parent, as opposed to like our peer. They’re just as good. They may not do things the way we would do them, but we have to let them, because that’s their kids, too, and that’s how we get a break. So, sometimes, it’s just being willing to let go. When we got divorced, I was able to have a regular schedule, and then I didn’t have to have the discipline. It was just built in.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, the difficulty in taking that time for yourself really speaks to me—my husband is willing to give me that time, and I have trouble taking it. I have trouble just going upstairs to my desk and closing the door. I hear that from a lot of women. I’ve heard, likewise, from many of the guests who are divorced, that they found it freed them up in many ways.

 

Deesha Philyaw

Is that quote from Carl Jung, something like, “The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of its parents.” Jung was saying that we think the worst thing is they’re gonna feel abandoned or they’re gonna feel unloved if we’re not there. But the worst thing for them is if we’re not there for ourselves, if we’re not showing up for ourselves and the things that we want to do and the things that we’re passionate about, to have unrealized dreams as a mother. That affects the kids.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Have your daughters talked at all about you as a writer and the example that you’ve set for them in following your creative pursuits?

 

Deesha Philyaw

No, I don’t think we’re there yet with them being that meta about it, but I know that they’re proud of me. I know they’re really happy for me. My oldest, I don’t know if she’s finished the book, but every now and then, she’ll text me and she’s like, “I really liked this part,” and that makes me feel really good. And my youngest hates when I say this, but the loudest she’s ever screamed was when she realized that Tessa Thompson started following me on Instagram. She’s been monitoring our accounts, and when she saw that, that was exciting. Not the awards or anything like that, but Tessa Thompson. Then when I said that, she was like, “No, that’s not true. I was excited before.” So, in fairness, I will tell both sides of it. But yeah, they’ve been celebrating with me, and I want to believe that it matters to them, because I’m always also encouraging them to do whatever they want. I’m the parent that’s like, “I think you should take a gap year,” and they’re like, “I don’t want to take a gap year.” I’m like, “No, really, take a gap year!”

 

Lara Ehrlich

You’re saying they were celebrating with you this year, and you’ve had a lot to celebrate. Tell me a little bit about what this year has been like. We were talking, before the interview started, about how exciting it’s been, but also in the midst of a global pandemic, the two sides of it.

 

Deesha Philyaw

Yeah, celebrating, but also knowing that more than one thing can be true at a time. There’s a lot of things that I’ve celebrated, and then there’s times when I’m just feeling really down, because I’m isolated. I spent half the time in the pandemic by myself, except for my dog, because my kids are with their dad part of the time, so that’s been really difficult. The awards are wonderful and validating, especially after so many years. People tell you short story collections don’t sell, I’m on a University Press, it’s a debut—all of those things. So, it was a wonderful surprise, and the opportunities that have come from it, having it adapted, but also having this larger platform and being able to then support other writers in ways that I would not have been able to before—all of that’s wonderful. Then, at the end of the day, there’s a deadly pandemic happening, and I’m sitting in my house by myself. That’s still hard. That’s still lonely. I had to show myself that grace and say yes, both things can be true. I’m completely honored and grateful, and today was really hard.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, definitely. And you’re working on a novel now, you were saying before the interview. Can you tell us anything about the novel?

 

Deesha Philyaw

There’s a church lady in it. Some things certainly have changed since I started in 2007, but what is the same is the main character is the wife of a mega church pastor. And in the Black church, the pastor’s wife is referred to as the First Lady. And she’s dissatisfied in her marriage and her station in life—that thread is the same. I’m looking to do some different things than I started in 2007. I’m also looking to make it a satirical novel. It was a little too on the nose for me as I was writing it, and there’s just a lot of funny stuff that was in the original draft. Everything else that wasn’t funny, felt navel gazing. I’m like, I got a solution for that.

 

Lara Ehrlich 

Okay, so this is the same novel that you started in 2007?

 

Deesha Philyaw

Same basic premise and main character, but she herself is different. I realized that one of the challenges I have as a writer, that I’m constantly working on, is raising the stakes. Like, when you and I logged on earlier, I was like, I just had this huge epiphany about this novel and it was like I ratcheted up the stakes for her in a way that I hadn’t before, with the scandal that she gets involved in. You know something with your head, but you don’t always apply it. There’s something in writing called “murder your darlings,” like, don’t be precious with your character. You have to have bad things happen to them. They have to be people who aren’t us who do things that maybe we wouldn’t do. I thought I had done a pretty good job with that, but I was coddling her into oblivion, into boredom. I didn’t care about her because she was so boring, so I had to give her some edges, some prickly parts. Now that she’s a little more prickly, there can be more at stake. And now I think it’s juicier than it was before.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Let’s talk about dissatisfaction. I’m also interested in dissatisfaction, as I think probably many writer mothers are. Tell me about this dissatisfaction in 2007 and the through line for the novel now. How is that changing?

 

Deesha Philyaw

Well, and let’s say, the dissatisfaction started in 2000, when I started writing. This 20-plus years, I think it’s dissatisfaction based on not being content with what we’re told we’re supposed to be content with, and also not being content having done everything right. Then it’s like, okay, I did all of that, and now I’m miserable, but you’re supposed to be satisfied. For those of us who are married, or we’re married heterosexually, if you found a good man, you’ve had these children, you’re financially stable, the world tells you that should be enough. Certainly, you’re happy. 

 

In the first incarnation of the novel, the pastor’s wife had that exact thing. She was married to a good man, she had a nice house, they had a nice life. I’ve been married twice, so one of my in-laws from the second marriage was reading this synopsis that I’d written of the book as it was then, and she was single into her late 40s and had not been partnered, and she said, “Well, that seems really like an interesting story, but can you make sure to explain why she’s so unhappy? Because I don’t get it. Because she has everything.” And it’s like, but what if she doesn’t love him? Or she doesn’t feel loved by him? Like I had mentioned, it was kind of a loveless marriage, and he was really married to the church and not to her. All this person could see was she’s got a husband, a nice house, good standing in the community—why is she miserable? I think that rings true for a lot of us.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah, that if you have all the right ingredients, that will make you happy. I think about that a lot, too, and about a restlessness underneath that, and what is it that we want? What was it you wanted?

 

Deesha Philyaw

This idea that we even have wants, because of how we’re raised to take care of everybody else’s needs and wants, and we’re not raised to take care of ourselves first. Sometimes, we exist to serve that whole. There’s a continuum, but for many of us, the range is really small in terms of what we should aspire to. Personal satisfaction is low on the totem pole. Sexual satisfaction, low on the totem pole. That’s not how we’re conditioned. Then, even when we do small things for ourselves, like take time out to write, you’ll hear women say, “I feel like I’m being selfish.” It’s like taking care of yourself isn’t selfish.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Now there’s the whole culture of self-care, too. Like it’s sort of like a luxury just do basic things, like take a shower. Tell me about your own restlessness and how it’s changed and how it’s come out in your writing.

 

Deesha Philyaw

My marriage—we met in college, and our first date was my 18th birthday, so that’s how long we had been together. We got married a year after college. I married really young, and certainly there are people who marry young, and it works out for them, but for myself, I didn’t know who I was, so how do you commit to spend a lifetime with someone when you’re still in process, and so were they. That was the difficult part, trying to figure out who I was and who I wanted to be. And that was evolving. Looking at the reasons for getting married and what they represented for me. There was that “normal.” I broke the cycle of women in my family who didn’t marry, so marriage was like winning the lottery. Why did I have to marry when I was 22? I didn’t. Why not wait? But it was this idea that I had gotten the brass ring, so you grab it, and you hold onto it—you don’t let it go. As opposed to, you got a whole life to live. You can date this person, you could live with them, but you don’t necessarily have to make this huge commitment at 22 years old, when you don’t know who you are. And so those kinds of growing pains start to show up. That’s what happened for me.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Yeah. Where you grew up and when you grew up, were your peers also getting married pretty much out of high school?

 

Deesha Philyaw

A couple of my friends married young. Now that I think of it, I don’t think any of those marriages lasted. My friends in college typically married later. But I was growing up with the idea that being a woman and having someone commit to you was like “now everything will be fine.” But there was not enough conversation about the quality of the relationship or why marriage was not like traveling and seeing the world or writing a book or something like that. Marriage was presented as an accomplishment.

 

Lara Ehrlich

How do you feel about it now?

 

Deesha Philyaw

If people are happy being married, I’m happy for them, but personally, I am looking at the marriage as an institution. And I don’t see the point. Because you can have a huge commitment. And queer folks did this forever—had huge commitments without the legal stamp of approval, so it’s clear that you don’t need marriage to have a commitment. And we also know, from those of us who get divorced, and also when people who have bad marriages, having a marriage doesn’t guarantee a good relationship. 

 

So, you know, why? That’s always my thing: why? There’s a young person in my life, not my child, who is 19, and she was telling me she wanted to get married. I was like, “Absolutely not.” And I started doing the whole “tell me why.” “Because this,” and I was like, “You don’t have to get married for that. You can have that and still not get married. What does marriage give you that you can’t have without it?” There are certain legal protections, okay. Other than that, though. I don’t think marriage guarantees fidelity or compatibility or good sex or any of that kind of stuff. I’m not anti-marriage, but I question it. I’m happy for people who are happily married. I love that.

 

Lara Ehrlich

No, it’s funny. I mean, I’m happily married, and my husband listens to the podcast, so I should be careful what I say, but I’m not sure I would get married again. Honestly, like you said, it’s so much more a legal thing than anything else. And I think, as you’re saying, you could have a partnership that lasts a long time, and it doesn’t need to be legally bound. I’m with you there. Tell me a little bit more about writing and motherhood. What did you learn craft-wise from revisiting this novel after having written a collection of short stories? What did writing a draft teach you about writing a novel?

 

Deesha Philyaw

It taught me that I can write fast. I thought I was somebody for whom every story has to take a year. No, it does not. It also taught me the importance of experimentation and pivoting and flipping things, because when I got stuck with the novel, it was “Oh, I don’t know how to move forward.” When I got stuck with stories, it was, “Well, I’ll move on to something else,” or “I’m gonna try it this way,” or, “What if.” 

 

If you’re someone who likes a lot of certainty, which I used to be, and I think I still kind of am, that was difficult, to take that approach. But I had a deadline to meet, and also, I had fun. I’m trying to bring that same sense of “what if” and fun and play and experimentation to writing. I’ve never been an outliner, and that requires a degree of trust—that you trust that without any kind of outline, if you just write and tell yourself the story as you’re going, these gems will emerge. And it happens. I think sometimes you forget it happens until you do it again. 

 

Having this short story collection and stories that turned out well, I know now that I can write 20 pages, and I might just get two paragraphs, and that’s a good thing. It’s not time wasted or anything like that. That is literally what drafting is. I think in that way, I have more confidence now that things will work out and that I will discover things. 

 

I see writing as a process of discovery. There’s a quote that says you’re writing to find meaning, not necessarily to tell people what happened. In the process of writing, you’re finding meaning for yourself in what happened, whether that story is a real story or a made-up story. Just delighting in the process and having a different perspective on urgency. I have a sense of urgency around writing, because I feel very much, especially during the pandemic, like we are so mortal, that we don’t have forever. But instead of that doom and gloom urgency, this urgency of “I want to tell this story. I want to see what happens next.” I’ve gotten to a place where I feel more confident and playful as a writer. And I think that will make me, first, finish this novel, and it’ll be better than it would have been before.

 

Lara Ehrlich

I’m always interested in the how short story writers switch to novels and vice versa. I started with a novel, too, and it was a laborious process, a five-year process, and I finished it, didn’t end up selling, and that’s fine. But pivoting to short stories felt like you’re saying, sort of freeing, and there’s a sense that if something’s not working, you can turn it on its head because it is only a short story. It’s like you can wrap your brain around it, and it’s hard to have that same sense of playfulness, at least when you’re a beginning writer, and you’re trying to write this important, epic novel, or whatever it is you’re working on.

 

Deesha Philyaw

In the beginning, too, I don’t know that many of us actually believe in drafting, like we say we do. We’re still editing as we go along, and that will always hinder you. I’m finally at a place where I will write a shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott said, and then go back in and revise and polish it up. I can do that. I get it now.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Let’s talk a little bit more about Church Ladies, and then I would love for you to read a little bit from it. Tell me about the stories and putting the collection together. I’m finding people are always interested in how you select the stories and that process, whether it’s organic, or whether you set out to write a collection. You told us a little bit about your agent; can you talk a little bit about the process of completing the collection and thinking through the stories that would come together as part of Church Ladies?

 

Deesha Philyaw

As I mentioned, my agent said, if I can get three stories published, that would be the basis for a manuscript. By the time I had the third story published, I actually had six stories written, and one of the stories is called “Peach Cobbler,” and I like to share that that was one that was not published and yet now is the story, when people have a favorite story, 9 times out of 10, it’s “Peach Cobbler.” That just shows that publishing and editing and rejection is all very subjective. 

 

There were the six stories, that was the partial manuscript, and it sold with those six stories. Then I had a word count that I had to build to from that. I decided that one of the stories was just kind of the weakest link, I didn’t care for it, and I also didn’t feel like I was so interested in it that I wanted to go and fix it and revise. So, I was like, I’ll just pull it out, and that gives me more words to fill. Then I had about two dozen or so pieces of stories, everywhere from a sentence long to 20 pages long and everything in between and looked at those and picked maybe 10 or 12 and wrote a one-sentence synopsis of each one. I gave it to five or six friends, some of whom are my regular readers and some who were not my regular readers—I wanted to have this range of people read these synopses and ask which ones would you want to read the whole story. Very quickly, five or six stories rose to the top. I was like, you know what, that’s it—these are the stories I’m going to start writing, and I’m going to write until I get to this word count, and that’s how I’m going to finish the collection. It ended up being four stories that got me to the word count. 

 

In terms of ordering the stories, I felt that “Eula” should be first because it was the first story I had published, so it was a little sentimental, but it’s also one of the most provocative, explicit stories in the collection, and I wanted to open with a bang. It also touches on all the themes that show up in the other stories. I thought, what a wonderful introduction. People can decide right away if they really want to read this or not. 

 

Then I wanted to mix up the stories so that you didn’t have really long stories back to back or real heavy stories back to back. “Dear Sister,” I think, is the funniest story in the collection, so sandwiching that between two heavier stories. I knew that I wanted to end with. I always think of the end like a sigh, whether it’s this collection as a whole or individual stories, because a sigh can be satisfaction, it could be resignation, it could be frustration, but it’s a sigh. And “When Eddie Levert Comes”—that’s the story that felt like a sigh to me. So, I had my bookends, and then I had a few rules for ordering things in the middle. It came together pretty well.

 

Lara Ehrlich

I love ending with a sigh. You hear people say, “Where do you start a story?” Start with a character or a sentence or whatever. And I love when people say, as you just did, there’s a feeling or an emotion that you want to evoke instead. I want to come back to Church Ladies and have you read for a second. With the novel, do you have an emotion that you’re starting with or that you want to evoke? Is it a sigh novel?

 

Deesha Philyaw

It will be like a satisfied sigh because, you know, I want it to be satirical. I do want people to laugh, but there’s also some serious stuff. It’s still based around this idea of church and the boxes that church compels us to try and squeeze ourselves into that don’t fit and the shame and the fear and the guilt—serious, heavy topics but handled satirically. 

 

I’m really inspired by Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. The way he opens that novel is fantastic. The main character is at the Supreme Court, the real Supreme Court, so he mentioned like real justices by name, and he’s, if memory serves, under a table, but he’s also smoking a huge blunt. And then after that amazing opening, the rest of the story starts with, how did he get there? How did he end up at the Supreme Court? He’s a Black man accused of enslaving another Black man, so not funny—slavery’s not funny—and yet, this whole premise, and how it’s presented, is actually hilarious. 

 

I’m going to try to do something like that. I’m, again, opening with a bang, and then handling these kind of weighty topics, but in a way where there is some levity. You know, with satire, you really are taking aim at something, so there’s a sharpness there, and there’s a seriousness. I took a workshop on satire, and it was pointed out that if you don’t have any love in your satire, it’s just sneering, you know, and I’m not gonna write a sneering novel. It’s mocking something that you love. Those are kind of the parameters that I’m working with right now.

 

Lara Ehrlich

Oh, that sounds like such a wonderful novel. I seriously can’t wait. And since we have a few minutes left, what will you read for us today.

 

Deesha Philyaw

I’m gonna read the first two pages of “Peach Cobbler.”

 

Lara Ehrlich

Please do.

 

Deesha Philyaw

My mother’s peach cobbler was so good, it made God Himself cheat on his wife. When I was 5, I hovered around my mother in the kitchen, watching—close enough to have memorized all the ingredients and steps by the time I was 6, but not too close to make her yell at me for being in the way and not close enough to see the exact measurements she used. She never wrote the recipe down. Without having to be told, I learned not to ask questions about that cobbler or about God. I learned not to say anything at all about him hunching over our kitchen table every Monday, eating plate after plate of peach cobbler and then disappearing into the bedroom I shared with my mother. I became a silent student of my mother and her cobbler-making ways, even when I was older and no longer believed that God and Reverend Troy Neely were one in the same. I still longed to perfect the sweetness and textures of my mother’s cobbler. My mother, who fed me TV dinners, baked a peach cobbler with fresh peaches every Monday, her day off from the diner where she waited tables. She always said Sunday was her Saturday and Monday was her Sunday. What I knew was that none of her days were for me. And for many of those Mondays, off and on during my childhood, God, to my child’s mind, would stop by and eat an entire eight-by-eight pan of cobbler. My mother never ate the cobbler herself. She said she didn’t like peaches. She would shoo me out of the kitchen before God could offer me any, but I doubted he would have offered, even if I’d sat right down next to him. God was an old fat man, like a Black Santa. And I imagined my mother’s peach cobbler contributing to his girth. Some Mondays, God would arrive after dinner and leave as I lay curled up on the couch watching Little House on the Prairie in the living room. Other times, my mother and God would already be in the bedroom when I got home from school. I could hear moaning and pounding like a board hitting a wall. As soon as I entered the house, I would shut the front door quietly behind me and tiptoe down the hall to listen outside the bedroom door. “Oh god, oh god, oh god,” my mother would cry. I could hear God, too, his voice low and growly, saying “yes, yes, yes.”

 

Lara Ehrlich

Wow. I have to say that’s one of my favorite stories in the collection, too. And amazing job reading it, too. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been such a pleasure.

 

Deesha Philyaw

This has been wonderful. Thank you.