THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF FIRST LADY FREEMAN

A rollicking satire of Black megachurch culture featuring an irresistible fireball of a protagonist.

Philyaw follows a much-lauded story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (2020), with a debut novel that reads as if she’s channeling the authentic voice of the biggest, baddest, most profoundly un-churchy church lady of all time. Married to Pastor David Freeman, Scharisse Freeman is the first lady of the 25,000-member Hope in Christ Baptist Church, a spiritual and business empire headquartered in Belleton, Georgia. We meet her backstage at the First Lady USA Pageant, an event she has been shut out of for years due to her rough background, the daughter of a teen mother who died young with no connection to the hierarchy of church lineage, a “rags-to-Rolex story,” as she puts it. And though a first lady is meant to epitomize the model of feminine subservience described in Proverbs 31, a Bible passage included at the front for the uninitiated, Scharisse could not be less interested in getting up while it is still night and preparing food or selecting wool and working with eager hands. She is a self-described “brand whore” and fashion diva who sees her wifely duty as keeping Pastor David busy in the bedroom and attending to the needs of her moody, hypercritical teenage daughter, Gabrielle. Yet this iconoclasm is belied by a burning need to win the approval of the holier-than-thou first lady clique, a project made even more difficult by secrets and scandals that erupt during the year leading up to the pageant. Scharisse is an irresistible character, more Prometheus than Proverbs 31, and readers will be rooting for her every step of the way, even as some of those steps are clearly faux pas. Philyaw’s vibrantly voicey tale will appeal to both insiders and outsiders of the culture it describes, a Crazy Rich Asians–style visit to a rarefied realm, but with much more hot sex. At 40, Scharisse is a woman deeply in touch with her physical needs. By the time she takes the stage at First Lady USA, she is also in touch with her soul.

Misogyny, classism, colorism, hypocrisy: begone! A fierce, fabulous, and very funny truth-teller cometh to take you down.