It’s fall in New York, which means I am rereading The Age of Innocence. This didn’t used to be my favorite Edith Wharton novel. For a long time, I loved The House of Mirth, but that book is so bleak, it makes for a very hard reread. I started periodically rereading The Age of Innocence when I was trying to make peace with working on a historical novel—a phrase that always brings to mind books where the hero suspiciously has the exact same morality as someone born in 1985 and no one ever thinks about their underwear. I did not want to write that, so I read The Age of Innocence, which is a historical novel (it’s written right into the title), though it’s rarely classified that way. Anyway, my favorite scene in this book is when Newland Archer and the Countess Olenska finally have their clandestine meeting in the Metropolitan Museum. In the pages before this scene, Wharton has written about the growing attraction between  Archer and his wife’s cousin, the Countess Olenska, mostly through Archer’s perspective. We understand that  Archer is a product of his time, a man who has never considered life or morality outside insulated upper-class New York. When he meets the Countess Olenska he falls in love with her unconventionality, her directness, and the fact that she doesn’t abide by or seem to understand the rules of the world they live in. When the two of them agree to meet at the Met, it is after many long conversations about what they mean to each other. They are finally alone in a darkened gallery, and  Archer attempts to come on to the countess. Archer believes that what he is saying—the passion he is conveying—must be convincing. But Wharton makes it clear that the Countess Olenska has lived through this many times before, from men claiming to be her friend, and even as the countess plays her part, it is clear she is disappointed that a unique affinity has devolved into a standard affair. It makes me want to go back and reread all the pages before this scene to see where the her actual nature is revealed, even through the intense haze of  Archer’s romanticism. It’s a good read for the fall because it’s a reminder of perspective, of what it might mean to really know another person—a perennial question, but one that feels especially poignant as the year comes to an end.

 

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman starts with a bang: a jaw-dropping scene set at a pageant for pastors’ wives during which one of the women strips down in an act inspired by the story of Eden. From there, Deesha Philyaw’s novel follows the life of Scharisee “Schar” Freeman, who, along with her husband, heads a megachurch and merchandising empire. Despite her success, Schar has never fit in with the other church women in her orbit. Philyaw is one of the few contemporary fiction writers who explores faith, particularly Christianity, as many people actually live it: with confusion, doubt, and contradiction. It’s ground she also covered in her 2018 best-selling book of short stories, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies. Here, Philyaw speaks with Harper’s Bazaar about writing about megachurches, the appeal of the tradwife for Black women, and what the best writing about sex can teach us.

 

Scharisee, your main character, is a conflicted woman. She’s a pastor’s wife who claims to not care about hierarchy and maybe doesn’t even believe in the god of her husband’s church. Yet she is a beneficiary of all of the church’s spoils. Can you talk a bit about choosing this outlook for her? 

Even though Schar leans into the surface-level trappings of being a first lady, she hasn’t completely shut off her brain or her conscience––though her estranged best friend Petra believes she did when she chose to marry a pastor. Schar has buried her doubts and questions about God and religion and just plays her role. She assuages her class guilt by sending hefty monthly checks to her Aunt Marie but otherwise cuts her out of her life. Schar doesn’t see herself as better than others; she’s more concerned about the church folk seeing her as lesser because of her past. And Aunt Marie represents that past. The role of first lady imbues Schar with respectability, but true belonging among the other first ladies eludes her. So when the pageant invitation arrives, she seizes it as a chance to finally get in their good graces. But of course, it’s not that simple. 

By positioning Schar this way, I give her a lot to reckon with: questions that, as you noted, we’re all reckoning with as well. How long can we live a lie, or live in opposition to our deeply held values, and at what price? What does living in fear––of exposure, of retribution––cost us? And conversely, is telling the truth, living our truth, and getting free worth what it will cost us? 

 

 

Can you talk about the appeal of the tradwife and “soft life” lifestyle and how that intersects with Blackness? How does the lure of patriarchy particularly appeal to and potentially harm Black women and girls? 

Between misogyny, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, homophobia, transphobia, gender-based violence, and bleak economic and political realities, Black women and girls are tired. Tired. I believe “soft life” is an appeal for a lifestyle rooted in rest, ease, relaxation, and gentleness––things we absolutely deserve. So I get it. My concern, though, is that so much of what’s promoted as soft life is rooted in consumption and capitalism––the same capitalism that’s exploiting us and wearing us down in the first place. And this exploitation and grinding down has always impacted Black women and girls disproportionately. 

The soft lifestyle ignores the long-term collective good in favor of immediate individual comfort. And when there’s reliance on a man to fund this soft life, that’s straight from the patriarchal playbook. Being at the financial mercy of men has always been a losing game for us. But so many embracing this lifestyle romanticize, or are just flat-out clueless about, the recent past. They believe the patriarchal lie that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were “good women” because they stayed married forever, ignoring the reality that for previous generations, leaving a man, particularly when you had kids, could be financial suicide for a woman. Literally life and death.

Same with tradwives, though I believe for Black women who pursue it, this desire for “traditional marriage” is code for “biblical marriage”—one where the man leads and is the head of the family and the wife submits, according to verses in the Book of Ephesians. Again, this is a recipe for disaster, a recipe for abuse of women, financial and otherwise. But this is what many of us in Gen X and our mothers and grandmothers were taught at home, at church, and in our broader communities. We were taught that our ultimate value lies with being appealing to men, being chosen by a man. Marriage was presented alongside college as a personal achievement. In my novel, Scharisse recalls thinking she’d won the lottery when a Morris Chestnut–fine pastor asked her to marry him. She was barely 23 years old, as was I when I married. I remember attending weddings as a teenager where the bride’s vows included the promise to “love, honor, and obey,” while the husband’s promise was to “love, honor, and cherish.” Some of us rejected this kind of hierarchy and control in our relationships, only to now watch other women willingly slide backward into it, searching for security and favor as patriarchy looms dangerously larger in all our institutions and as our rights are eroded.

 

 

What is your relationship to the church, and where does Christianity live in your creative practice? 

I went to church and professed Christianity until I was around 35. Specifically, I was sent to church as a child. I was raised by my mother and my grandmother, but they didn’t go to church themselves until years later. When I was in college, my mom started going. In retrospect, I believe they felt unwelcome in church as single mothers. But they sent me. They never told me why; I guess they hoped I could be salvaged within a religious community that judged them. 

After my mother died in 2005, I stopped going to church. People asked if it was because I was angry at God. But it was actually because I felt nothing toward God. I’d long had unspoken questions and doubts about Christianity, but I couldn’t ignore them any longer. I’d lost my mother, but I didn’t feel any of the comfort we’d sing about in church, the comfort and the peace that came with being “saved.” And I certainly didn’t believe any of the BS theology that said my mother was in “a better place.” The final straw was a practical one. I was newly divorced and coparenting two kids who had activities; Sunday was our one day to sleep in. Why was I wasting that one day doing something that didn’t mean anything to me anymore?

I stopped going to church, but I didn’t stop writing about it. I was just getting started. Church and Christianity had been foundational to my childhood and adolescence. Then I’d married a fellow Christian in my early 20s, and we were a Christian family. We attended and volunteered at church, went to Christian couples’ retreats, read Christian marriage and parenting books—but thankfully ignored the toxic stuff—listened to contemporary Christian music, that whole scene. 

But what has stuck with me most is the churches of my youth—particularly the women in them and the women outside of them, like my mother and my grandmother. I’d looked to these women as possibility models for who I could be. I was curious about how they navigated the church’s strict teachings around sex and sexuality, about how they managed desire. I carried this curiosity into my adulthood, into my marriage, looking at my own Christian womanhood and finding it wanting. I was deeply unsatisfied but too afraid to live any other way. Until I wasn’t. 

My interest in churched and unchurched women and their dissatisfactions and desires persists in my writing. It’s not all I write about; my next book, another collection of short stories, attests to that. But if I wanted to, I could write forever about Black women, sex, and the Black church.

 

 

I am sure you have been asked this question many times, but can you talk a bit about writing sex and romance for your characters and how you approach writing this on the page? Is there a piece of writing about sex that you admire for its craft? Is there one you really don’t like? 

I actually don’t get asked this question often enough. I think we need to hear from more writers, more often, about writing sex and romance to show that there’s no one “right” way to do it. And that there’s no shame in doing it as a “serious” writer. There are a lot of ways to fuck it up—no pun!—but a million ways to do it justice. My approach varies, but I try not to press Pause and shift to some sort of capital-S Sex writing mode. We get squirmy about writing about sex because we live in a confused, self-conscious, violence- and shame-ridden culture that is both prurient and puritanical when it comes to sex. So we have to heal or work around all of that just to get to the page and not be hung up about it. It helps if we remember what Garth Greenwell said about sex, that it’s a “kind of crucible of humanness,” one of the most human things about us, so it should absolutely be in our writers’ toolbox. I try to do what Melissa Febos says and treat a sex scene like any other scene. It just needs to do its job in the story, whatever that is. Above all, I try to hold an expansive view of sex and the erotic, as Audre Lorde makes the case for in her seminal 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Here, Lorde writes of the erotic as sensation combined with depth of feeling, a source of connection, as well as armor against systems of oppression. Lorde’s position pairs well with journalist Dr. Joan Morgan’s declaration, “I want an erotic that demands space be made for honest bodies that like to also fuck.”

In my work, the sex scenes have been moments of lust, frustration, comfort, awkwardness, sweetness, power, anger, contradiction, hypocrisy, manipulation, desperation, withholding, release. Some are honest; some are dishonest. All the things. Anything except earnest or on the nose. That’s boring to me. So sometimes my sex scenes are funny. Sometimes they don’t feature any actual sex. And I like to play with form. I wrote an essay once about my post-divorce sex life as a then-46-year-old in the form of a weather forecast. 

I think the “She was the third beer…” passage in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is one of the sexiest pieces of writing in literature. There’s so much tangled up in it: desire, hierarchy, revelation, objectification, a kind of deceptive tenderness.

I’m very much over the middle-aged-woman-reclaiming-her-sexual-power stuff, or rather the way it’s typically written. It’s like the girlboss equivalent of sex writing. And it fails mostly because it parades as feminism but isn’t at all intersectional. I like my sex writing with a side of self-awareness.

 

In each edition of this newsletter, we ask writers to share a space where they wrote something beautiful. It can be their regular writing spot or an unexpected place of inspiration. This week’s writer is R.O. Kwon. Kwon is the author of The Incendiaries, Exhibit, and the anthology Kink with Garth Greenwell. 

R.O. Kwon: “When I write fiction, I need much of the rest of the world to fall away. Having blackout curtains and low lighting in my writing space—which doubles as my dining room—helps me get to a place where it’s just me and my imagined world. This is also why I have nothing on the walls. I love and depend on visual art for my writing in general and definitely for my second novel, Exhibit, which is narrated by a photographer, but alas! Visual art is too absorbing. Some books are also in this room, including my most prized possession, my desperately beloved OED.”