The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

This is like a 2.5 I'm rounding up, which I feel so bad about. I got sucked into all the glowing reviews of this book and forgot to pay attention to my own taste... This is contemporary fiction, realistic fiction, maybe even slice of life. I hardly ever enjoy that, especially in short story format. So this is on me for picking it up, but I am glad to test my taste sometimes, too. This was short, so it wasn't a big commitment.

I found most of these stories to be too surface level, which probably sounds weird to say. As an exvangelical, I loved that she was exploring fundamentalism like this, but I was left wanting more. I've had many discussions about evangelical upbringing that cover more than the sexual policing that this collection focuses on. The collection never delves deep into "why?" What do people get out of it and why is it hard to change?

Of the bunch, I think I liked Eula the best. I appreciate how it explored some of the impossible decisions people within conservative Christianity have to make. Snowfall is similar, but I preferred Eula. I found Instructions For Married Christian Husbands to be one of the more memorable ones because it veered more into something a bit weird which I do enjoy, though for this one to really work for me I'd like to see it go further with over the top requirements for the men. :)

My favorite part of emerging from a good book is being transformed: I'd never thought of that; or, so that's what it's like; or, in one way or another, the way I see the world has changed.

This book did not affect me that way, and it took me a while to understand why: it's because most of the books I've read by nonwhitemale writers are written inside-out: offering the privileged reader a chance to experience the life of the underprivileged, to empathize and understand. Church Ladies is kind of the opposite, an outside-in, written by someone who escaped a shitty narrowminded world, for the benefit of those still stuck in it, showing them that it doesn't have to be that way, that they too can escape. It's one of those "what the hell is water" insights: religion, so prevalent that it's invisible, except in this case it isn't life-sustaining water but a toxic suppressing miasma. Philyaw paints so many of its insidious effects: intolerance, self-loathing, toxic masculinity, parental neglect and abuse, desperate loneliness. For the most part she does so in a gentle corner-of-the-eye sort of way, but once in a while she punches damn hard:

Your mother speaks longingly of Judgment Day, and the final accounting of who's allowed past the pearly gates, certain that God's accounting will mirror hers. "It will be a very small number," she's fond of saying. "Only those who walk the straight and narrow path shall see the face of God." / And you realize that if God were to welcome everyone into heaven, your mother would abandon Christianity immediately.

Know anyone like that? Me too.

I was not transformed -- because I already had been, decades ago, by other writers I read as a child, who showed me worlds that were possible but which I, in my tiny pocket of ignorance, could not otherwise have imagined. Philyaw is continuing their work, it's just that I'm not her target audience, but there are millions who are. This book needs to make its way to them. That's why I chose five stars instead of the four that it felt like to me.

And, a final insight after rereading this: I am, actually, transformed. Because I do consider myself privileged, so much so that I even take it for granted... and, fifty years ago, that was not necessarily a given. My life could've gone so many different ways. I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to writers like Philyaw, those who wrote from the outside in, saying, there are other pools of water out there, cleaner fresher ones, come join us. (And that just reinforces my five stars).