Dear readers, If you’re going to name a short story after a dessert, you probably couldn’t do better than peach cobbler. There’s a reason that Deesha Philyaw has built a cult following around her story “Peach Cobbler,” which arrives midway through her award-winning collection “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.” It’s funny, sensual and bittersweet. The narrator thinks her pastor, with whom her mother is having an affair, is God himself based on the cries she hears behind the bedroom door during his visits. It’s also an ideal introduction to Philyaw’s work, which burrows into the interior lives of God-fearing women trying to reconcile their desires with their faith. With her first novel, Philyaw is working in an entirely different mode — outrageous, snarky and satirical. “The True Confessions of Lady Freeman,” which comes out on Sept. 29, follows Scharisse, the wife of a megachurch pastor in Georgia. Her husband is wealthy and powerful, tending to a congregation the size of a public university, but Schar, as she’s known, is still trying to earn the esteem of her fellow “first ladies.” The novel’s climax is a pageant for these women to compete in terms of holiness and wholesomeness, but Schar takes a very different path to the stage than she had planned. (Think a striptease with a symbolically loaded apple.) I spent four leisurely hours in Miami with Philyaw last month talking about motherhood, ambition, disappointment and pleasure. They’re all of a piece for her, and she doesn’t shy away from life’s messiness in her fiction. Betrayal, infidelity and hypocrisy are rampant in the novel, along with devastating comebacks and a whole lot of sarcasm. Philyaw, it turned out, has been living with Schar as a character for two decades. They matured together and learned to grieve in tandem. Knowing this back story adds a poignant dimension to “True Confessions.” Even for a novel so over the top and undeniably juicy, it has a very tender heart. I’ll see you next week. Like this email?
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