June 2025 Feature: Deesha Philyaw

Deesha Philyaw is the award-winning author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.

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 the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction. Deesha’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.

Snap

“Birds taught a lot of men how to become caring men.”

– William “Speedy” Boykins

“You can have success.”

– Paul Gomez

Despite his absence and his negligence, or perhaps because of them, my earliest memory is of my father. We are at the house where I live with my mother and my grandmother. This is the only time I remember him being inside our house in the eighteen years I lived there. In this memory, I’m a toddler, not yet potty trained. I know this because my mother has called my father to come and force me to sit on the potty. 

My father arrives, and he is angry and threatens to spank me. I don’t want him to spank me or to be angry with me. I want him to love me. Somehow, I already understand that his love is tenuous. So I sit on the potty. When he begins to leave, I notice that wrestling (the fake kind) is on TV. I recall seeing my father, grandfather, and uncles watching wrestling during the occasional weekends I spend at my grandparents’ house, the house where my father lives with his parents and siblings — or rather, the place where he gets his mail and changes his clothes once or twice a week. Because I know my father likes wrestling, I try to point out that wrestling is on the TV: to get in his good graces, to put the whole potty thing behind us. But either I don’t have the words to tell him, or he’s ignoring me. I am not yet toilet-trained, but already I’m trying to figure out how to make my father stay.

In 1971, when 22-year-old Cornell Norwood was forming the Black Country Roller Club for Black male pigeon fanciers, I was born to my 18-year-old mother and 20-year-old father, Donald, who everybody called Snap though I never knew why. Did they call him “Snap” because he was a short, scrawny man, “not bigger than a minute,” as some old folks would say while snapping their fingers? Or was it because you could snap your fingers and he was gone that quickly from wherever he had been just before — a woman’s life, or a child’s?

I said a long time ago that I was done writing about my father. That I had said all that I wanted or needed to say about him. But lately, he’s been showing up in my essays, showing up in places he has no business being. He did that twenty years ago when I was almost-30, trying to track me down when I was back in my hometown for a visit. I thought of all the lies, of all the times I’d waited on the front porch for him to show up, pick me up, give me lunch money, and he didn’t, after saying he would. You want to follow me around when I’m 30, but you couldn’t show up for me when I was 3? Or 13? I told him to back off.

There’s so much I don’t know about my father, and the little I do know has caused me more grief than happiness. 

What I do know: Snap was a ladies’ man. But my (half) sister T and I could never understand the appeal of him. Once we were old and cynical enough to joke about his neglect, we’d wonder what our mothers had been smoking to make them think Snap was a catch; after all, crack hadn’t yet seized our community in the early 70s when we were born. My stepmother (Snap married in middle age) once offered a clue, oversharing with me in a horrible moment of grief-filled TMI, which, however uncomfortable, was fitting: I always felt my father belonged to women, to the streets, to the bar, to everything and everyone except me. In his carnal world, there was no place for a child.

How did my father define success? I never knew his aspirations, or if he had any. I never heard him complain about racism or White folks. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t; I never heard him say much of anything about the world beyond women, Champale, and his beloved Saturday morning wrestling. But perhaps he saw potential for success in me. He must’ve bragged on my good grades to the White bosses at the luggage manufacturing company where he worked for more than twenty years because on the occasions he took me to his job, these jowly, red-faced White men would say things to me like, “You’re the smart one. Spell a big word for me!” Dance, lil monkey, dance.

Years later, I learned that my father’s Black and Brown co-workers, the line workers who made the luggage, had considered him an Uncle Tom. He held a supervisory role, a layer of management between them and the White bosses. Neither the line workers nor the bosses respected my father, although the bosses did bail him out for a time. They gave him advances on his paychecks, believing his lie that he was a single father raising four daughters whose mothers were all drug addicts. They also believed the lie that he was paying for me to go to Yale, a lie bolstered by a bumper sticker he bought for his minivan when he, my uncle, and my mother drove to New Haven to move me into my dorm: My Daughter and My Dollars Go to Yale, it read. In the course of my four undergraduate years, my father gave me fifty dollars, once.

I think of my father’s multiple car repossessions (including the minivan and a car he “bought” for me) and how he never lived under a roof that didn’t belong to my grandparents or a woman, and I wonder what kind of father he could have been if he’d been successful at something. Or if he could’ve practiced caring on some birds. Or had space to be creative and feel in control, part of a community. Maybe then he would’ve taken me to the zoo, which is where my mother believed he took me when he did keep his word and pick me up on the weekends. She casually mentioned this zoo thing when I was in my 20s, and I laughed an unkind laugh and told her she had to be kidding, that there was nothing about my father that said, Take my kid to the zoo. His unkempt appearance and unreliability aligned more with the bars and women’s homes he took me to. My mother’s delusions about my father had roots in the wounds left by her own father’s absence. She never asked me where Snap took me; she needed to believe in a version of him that didn’t hurt me.

Chuck Hatcher, Cornell Norwood’s pigeon protégée, credits the birds with being “solace, meditative, almost a spiritual aspect to inner peace, because the Black man has so much to deal with…” Did my father ever know peace? Was he troubled by his life as a Black man in this country, or by his failures as a father? I used to wonder, as a kid, if he ever missed me, if he ever felt sad or guilty about disappointing me more than he kept his word. I wondered if he felt bad about missing so much of my life and my (half) sisters’ lives. I wondered if his many lies weighed on his conscience. I wondered why his mother’s God didn’t “convict his heart,” a phrase I’d heard in church. I wondered if my father thought of me on my birthday or at Christmas, even though he didn’t give me gifts, even though I still gave him gifts at my mother’s insistence. I wondered if he ever considered apologizing.

Brought together by my mother’s terminal cancer, my father and I had six good Sundays before he died unexpectedly of a massive stroke at age 54, a few months after my mom passed away. On those six Sundays, so much was left unsaid. My father left me with far more questions than answers. More than fifteen years after his death, the questions remain but the focus has changed. I wonder less now about how my father thought of himself as my father, and more about how he thought of himself as a man who lived, it seemed, without tenderness. If he thought of himself that way at all. I don’t have to wonder if he could miss what he never had. I already know that much to be true.

©2021 Pipe Wrench Magazine. First published in Pipe Wrench.

THE INTERVIEW

This interview was conducted between Deesha Philyaw and Jae Nichelle on May 5th, 2025.

“Snap” is such a moving and intimate piece. As an accomplished essayist and storyteller, do you feel any difference in your relationship with how your nonfiction lives in the world versus your fiction work?

I feel freer, bolder in my fiction. And once my stories are in the world, they no longer belong just to me. Readers engage with my fiction in all sorts of ways, and I’m continually surprised and appreciative to hear how they connect with the stories. By contrast, my willingness to be open and revelatory in my personal essays has unfolded very gradually over many years. I’m concerned with self-protection as well as protecting others I care about. Once those essays are out in the world, I feel a bit exposed and less comfortable engaging directly with readers about them. It’s easier to talk with strangers about my short stories, their themes and origins, and my process than about aspects of my personal life and history. But I don’t really stress too much about it because my essays have a lower profile in the world than my fiction. 

In the essay, you write that you’d told yourself you were done writing about your father. Is there anything currently that you feel “done” writing about?

I think I really am done now writing about my father in my nonfiction. I can’t think of anything else I’m ready to swear off writing about. That said, aspects of my father and of our relationship will probably continue to show up in my fiction. 

It’s interesting that this idea of “success” comes up in “Snap,” as you spoke of success in an interview with Literary Mama where you said, “I am succeeding when my heart is in good shape.” What’s keeping your heart in good shape these days?

Traveling with my partner, going to therapy, spending time with my daughters and with my friends, and reading some really stellar poetry collections, including Boy, Maybe by W.J. Lofton and The Book of Alice by Diamond Forde (forthcoming).

What’s your favorite way to spend a day off?

Sleeping in, eating brunch foods I don’t have to cook, curling up on the couch with books to read purely for pleasure. 

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, your debut novel, is coming out in 2026! Can you share a bit about how this story initially took shape? 

This book has been a long time coming and has had several incarnations. I started writing it in 2007 with a main character who was then named Rebecca, a former megachurch pastor’s wife, aka first lady. In that earliest draft, she was recently divorced and struggling to co-parent with the pastor (who was 15 years her senior), while starting to date again. That was kind of my life at the time; my ex wasn’t a pastor, but I was newly divorced and dating. An early reader gave me some advice that ultimately changed the whole trajectory of the novel, for the better. I’d written a chapter or two, which she’d read, and she said they were cool but she really wanted to see the inside of Rebecca’s marriage to the pastor, before it ended. So I re-oriented the novel such that it opened with Rebecca unhappily married. And I realized when I returned to that draft that I’d skipped ahead to Rebecca’s divorce probably because I didn’t want to revisit my own unhappy marriage. And thus began the process of separating myself from the character, allowing her to be herself, and not me, allowing her choices and tastes and values to differ from mine. The biggest change was that the character went from secretly hating her role as first lady (as I would) to fully relishing it at the outset of the novel. That change opened up a whole world of fun possibilities, enabling me to give Scharisse (fka Rebecca) more depth and to give her story as a whole higher stakes, as her marriage and her life as a whole begin to unravel.

You co-host two incredible podcasts. What’s a moment with a recent podcast guest that has stuck with you?

Destiny O. Birdsong was our guest on Ursa Short Fiction, and we were discussing a short story of hers that included content related to sex work and queer sex. The story was published online and then taken down by the publisher less than 24 hours later for dubious reasons that basically boiled down to poorly disguised censorship. When it happened, Destiny says, “I had this overwhelming feeling that felt very familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it, and it wasn’t until a few days later that I realized that that feeling was slut shaming. And there’s something about being slut shamed, like it lives in my bones. It’s like muscle memory.” And that made me think about how powerful shame is, and how deeply rooted it can live in us if we were raised to be ashamed of our bodies, our desires, or even our insistence on liberation and rejection of binaries. Rooting out that shame––calling it by its name as Destiny did––requires vigilance, sometimes daily.

On the subject of podcasts, what’s a non-literary topic that you could talk about for hours if someone let you?

It’s a tie between 1) how the horrible manosphere/misogynistic podcast industrial complex makes dating damn-near impossible, and 2) the new Black soap opera, Beyond the Gates. I am obsessed with that show!

How can people support you right now? 

By pre-ordering or buying (depending on the timing) That's How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor edited by the Pittsburgh homie Damon Young. I have a story in it, “Group Chat,” that’s hilarious, if I do say so myself.

Name another Black woman writer people should know. 

I can’t name just one! There’s Annell López, author of the remarkable debut short story collection I’ll Give You a Reason. Jamila Minnicks’ fantastic debut novel of historical fiction, Moonrise Over New Jessup, is essential reading. The inimitable Mahogany L. Browne’s latest is a beautiful and timely YA novel, A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe. My West Virginia University Press-mate, Megan Howell, has written a jaw-dropper of a story collection, Softie. And I’m looking forward to Cleyvis Natera’s stunning sophomore novel The Grand Paloma Resort.

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