“How to Make Love to a Physicist” - A Short Story by Deesha Philyaw - from her debut collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

 

“How to Make Love to a Physicist” - A Short Story by Deesha Philyaw - 2020 - from her debut collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

I’m deeply honored and thankful to receive the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction,” said Philyaw. “I wrote The Secret Lives of Church Ladies in hopes that Black women would see and hear themselves in my characters who are all, in some way, striving to get free. Winning this award during a time of unconscionable loss, grief, and injustice, I’m reminded just how tenuous our freedom is. I’m reminded of and encouraged by Toni Morrison’s words: ‘The function of freedom is to free someone else.’ On the other side of this time of reckoning and the fight ahead, may we all be free.”

You may read this story here

My Prior Post on a story by Deesha Philyaw,When Eddie Levert Comes

Since my first post on the work of Deesha Philyaw there has been some very gratifying News.

Deesha Philyaw has won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her debut short story collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

The collection was chosen for this year’s prize by judges Charles Finch, Bernice L. McFadden, and Alexi Zentner, and was selected from 419 eligible works of fiction by American authors published in 2020 the U.S. and submitted by 170 publishing houses.

“Deesha Philyaw speaks in the funny, tender, undeceived voices of her title characters, who have more in common perhaps even than they know, from love to loss to God,” the judges said in a statement. “In the group portrait that emerges, Philyaw gives us that rarest and most joyful fusion—a book that combines the curious agility of the best short fiction with the deep emotional coherence of a great novel.”  From https://www.penfaulkner.org/2021/04/06/announcing-the-winner-of-the-2021-pen-faulkner-award-for-fiction/

My main reason for this post is to encourage all lovers of literature of The highest quality to read her work.  Anyone who ever dismissed Short Stories as not quite serious enough for deep Reading Will be challenged to hold to that opinion.

The narrator is a fortyish African American woman, who teaches art in a 

Public School. We meet her at an academic conference devoted to creating Programs for students of the arts and sciences to see the two disciplines coming together.  She likes to see How many black men are at conferences, with a slight eye to meeting someone that her mother might find acceptable.

She meets a very accomplished physicist.  She likes him but is cautious about rushing into things.  The excitement of the story line is seeing the relationship develop. On first meeting they talk for hours.  She tells him of her work, he reciprocates.  They begin to exchange texts but the man at first has no romantic interest, it seems.

I really hope you Will read this wonderful story.

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, THE SECRET LIVES OF CHURCH LADIES, won the 2020/2021 Story Prize and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First 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 a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow.   From

https://www.deeshaphilyaw.com/

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“When Eddie Levert Comes “ Short Story by Deesha Philyaw - from her debut collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

“When Eddie Levert Comes”. A Short Story 

by Deesha Philyaw - from her debut collection The Secret Lives of Church Ladies -2020

Recommended by Rion Amilcar Scott on Electric Literature -December 2020

You may read the story here

Website of Deesha Philyaw

I have seen The Secret Life of Church Ladies on several lists of highly recommended debut short story collections.  I am thankful to Electric Literature for featuring one of the stories from the collection on their website.

The story is narrated by a woman, we never learn her name, who is the primary care giver for her mother who suffers from dementia.  It seems long ago the mother had a one night stand with Eddie Levert,the lead singer in a Philadelphia soul group.  Now she insists that this very day he is coming back for her.  Now the mother is a “church lady” but she had children by three different men, brought strangers home to have sex with while are kids are home and drank to excess.  Then, she “got religion” and quit her old ways.  Then  overtime, we don’t know how long ago, lost her grasp on reality.

We learn a lot about her life, she favors her two sons over her daughter even though they don’t do much to help her.  She seems to most favor her lightest skinned son, whose father was Puerto Rican. Her daughter was much darker.

The daughter is doing well as a real estate agent and investor.  She has a long time boyfriend who seems decent.

Philyaw takes us deeply into the psyche of the mother and daughter.  We see how the church, which does not much interest the daughter, is of paramount importance.   We don’t learn anything about the childhood of the mother, what drove her to multiple partners, to seeing it as 

ok to have loud sex at home, and to judge other African Americans by their skin tones.  We know nothing of the daughter’s father, her mother never married.

Throughout the story the mother insists she must have on make up and be dressed to meet Eddie Levert when he returns.  Her children live with this.

In one very sad scene her light skinned son comes to visit, first time in months.  The mother seems to think her daughter is a paid nurse but she is overjoyed to see “her baby” whom she praises to the sky for taking such good care of her.

There are two other stories you can read online and I hope to read them next year.

I am very glad to have discovered Deesha Philyaw.

“When Eddie Levert Comes” is a great Short Story.

About the Author

Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, focuses on Black women, sex, and the Black church. Deesha is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. 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, The Rumpus, Brevity, dead housekeeping, Apogee Journal, Catapult, Harvard Review, ESPN’s The Undefeated, The Baltimore Review, TueNight, Ebony and Bitch magazines, and various anthologies. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and a past Pushcart Prize nominee for essay writing in Full Grown People. From the Author’s website.