The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

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O'Driscoll, Bill. "Pittsburgh-Based Author Explores 'The Secret Lives Of Church Ladies' ". www.wesa.fm . Retrieved 2020-10-18. And the girl whose mother regularly shares peach cobbler and herself with their married male pastor. The girl, now a teen, begins tutoring lessons and a liaison with the same pastor’s son. The complicated lives of these women begins with “Eula.” On the eve of Y2K, Caroletta prepares to meet her best friend Eula at a hotel. It’s their annual New Year’s Eve ritual: a suite, good eats, and bottles of André Spumante to ring in the new year. Their conversations turn to relationships and love, and both of these 40-year-old women have different ideas about what that means. Eula wants to date to find the husband that God has for her and live in a traditional, Biblical family. For Caroletta, love is whoever and whatever she wants—and that includes Eula, her part-time lover.

Liaw, Amanda (2021-02-02). "Announcing the longlist for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction | The PEN/Faulkner Foundation". PEN/Faulkner Foundation . Retrieved 2021-02-05. The fact that this is still happening today. That these women exist in this world by the thousands and are struggling so hard to be ‘good’ godly women but finding the double standards of the church unbearable, is so heart breaking.How do you make love to a physicist? You send him an apology in the form of one of the many sketches of him you have made, in a silver frame. He doesn’t respond right away. And you’re okay with that; you knew the risk you ran, disappearing the way you did. But when he does reach out, you’re both quiet on the phone for a long time before you say, “It’s just something I had to do. For me. I didn’t have the words for it then, and I’m not entirely sure I do now.”

a b c Winik, Marion. "Review: 'The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,' by Deesha Philyaw". Star Tribune . Retrieved 18 October 2020. Rodney Barnes Sets Scary Podcast Series ‘Run, Fool!’ With Ballen Studios, Eyes TV & Film Adaptations Throughout these stories we constantly watch women be good caregivers, good lovers, good people with gifts to share, and see them be squandered by a patriarchal society. ‘ Because he was a man who took without giving, he left us nothing to grieve,’ one narrator remarks. There are affairs with no thought to the women they will hurt, men who beat their wives to death in front of their infant children, or, as in Jael predatory men who even at the age of 35 prey on 15 year old girls. Philyaw pulls a reversal on the power dynamic in Instructions for Married Christian Husbands, a story sharp with satirical wit as a woman lays out her unbreakable rules for ‘ the infantilized husbands of accomplished godly women’ she sleeps with purely for pleasure and power. It is a fresh burst in the collection along with the rather adorable slow burn romance in Physicist.I was also fascinated with the many types of relationships- mother/daughter, men/women, women/women...