Two people who have spent their adult lives being looked at drive two hours south, separately, to a county where nobody knows either of them. They park outside a diner, climb down an embankment and sit on a boulder beside a creek the road cannot see. He has brought water and a blanket. She has dressed down, badly, in the only inconspicuous clothes a woman with a walk-in closet could assemble. Then he tells her what her mother actually died of, and what his father had to do with it, and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw properly begins.
Scharisse Freeman is forty, First Lady of one of America’s largest Black churches, and for seventeen years she has walked an annual breast cancer fundraising route in her mother’s memory. Her mother did not have breast cancer. She has half suspected this since college, and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw opens with the suspicion becoming fact in the mouth of a man she can barely stand.
The Script Inside the True Confessions of First Lady Freeman
The spine of the novel is a comedy routine. For the talent round of a pageant restricted to Black pastors’ wives, Scharisse has spent nine months writing a set about the Proverbs 31 woman, the scriptural wife held up to church girls as the standard: rises before dawn, spins her own cloth, considers a field and buys it, is praised at the city gate for everything her hands have done.
The routine is affectionate and toothless, and we watch it get written, workshopped before eleven hostile rivals, scrapped for something incendiary, softened under threat, then restored. Whichever version she is carrying is an exact readout of how much truth she can currently afford.
What she eventually notices is that the famous passage does not begin where she was taught. Nine verses come first, and they are a mother warning her son about power: speak for those who cannot, judge fairly, do not spend yourself on women who ruin kings. The part quoted to women is the part that follows. Read together, the passage stops being an aspiration and starts reading like an instruction manual, and The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw is very good on the difference.
The formal choices serve that reading. Chapters alternate with found material: group emails from the pageant’s new owners, an obituary, a crisis memo, text threads, a talk-show transcript, personal ads. Sixty-odd footnotes run beneath the text in Scharisse’s voice, saying what the woman in the scene above has decided not to. Groups who like taking a book apart will have plenty to hold.
The Friend She Keeps Spending
The marriage is the plot. The friendship is the wound.
Petra arrived from London in the eighth grade, introduced herself by listing which famous parents of hers had died and how, and proposed they form a club on the strength of it. For five years they were the whole of each other’s world. Then Scharisse got engaged, a church mentor explained that an unbeliever could not stand beside her at the altar, and Scharisse made the call.
Philyaw stages that afternoon as a play script with stage directions, the only way a scene that humiliating could be survived twice. Petra returns in the middle of the scandal, unprompted and generous, and then discovers she is still being kept where the church cannot see her. Her second exit is worse than the first, because this time she can name it.
That thread is where The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw earns its keep. The husband’s betrayal is legible a mile off; a man who tells you the institution comes first will not surprise you when it does. The friendship is the one Scharisse actually breaks, repeatedly, by choice, while insisting she has no options.
Comedy as the Only Available Container
The most notorious sequence in The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw is a couples’ retreat Scharisse organised a decade earlier for a company selling marital aids. It plays as pure farce for thirty pages, then stops being funny in one line of dialogue, when it becomes clear what the twelve women at that resort had and had not been told about their own anatomy. One had gone eight years without her husband touching her and filed it under personal failure.
The same technique carries the heaviest material. Scharisse’s aunt, a retired postal worker and former crack user, gives the full account of what happened to her sister in a spa sauna, in dialect, interrupting herself with unwanted detail about her own sex life. It is the tenderest writing here and almost entirely jokes, because the jokes are scaffolding for a story nobody in this family can say plainly.
Philyaw also refuses the easy version of the mother. At fifteen she had no capacity to agree to any of it. More than a decade later, grown and lonely, she chose to see him again. A minor character is given room to explain why that happens to survivors, and the explanation excuses nobody. It is the most careful thinking in The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw.
Where Lady Freeman, Deesha Philyaw’s Narrator, Loses the Thread
The ending of The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw states its own meaning three times. Scharisse says it onstage, which is correct and thrilling. A television interview has her say it again in answer to questions. The final pages have her summarise the memoir she wrote about the events we just read. A reader who got that far does not need the tour.
Other costs:
- Between the capitulation in May and pageant week in November there is half a year of calendar and about one development to fill it, so the middle runs on set pieces while the plot waits.
- The husband is a stance and an appetite. Twice we hear he used to play funk guitar; that man never turns up, which makes the loss cheap.
- The romance with the household cook is the flattest strand and the most revisited, and it delivers the one soft landing in a book otherwise merciless.
- The proof that clears her name arrives as an inscribed object handed over by a teenager. Very tidy, for a novel this suspicious of tidiness.
For the Group
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw gives a group plenty to argue about. Start with what Scharisse says she wanted and what she was actually chasing, because they are not the same thing and she is the last to know. Ask whether the church elders ever behave irrationally, or whether every decision is coldly correct given what they protect. Ask who in this book is extended grace and who is merely managed, and notice that the two are not distributed randomly. Then the harder one: whether Scharisse’s treatment of Petra differs in kind from her husband’s treatment of her, and whether the novel thinks so.
Groups should know going in that the book deals directly with the grooming and rape of a child by a clergyman, an AIDS death and the stigma around it in the 1980s, addiction, suicide, and a great deal of explicit sex. It is euphemistic about none of it.
Read it alongside Kin by Tayari Jones, another Georgia novel where a marriage meets something larger than itself, or The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams, which also assembles a family from parts it was told not to mention. Colored Television by Danzy Senna is sharper if the reinvention plot holds you, and Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite suits anyone drawn to inheritance treated as a verdict. Zeal by Morgan Jerkins rewards readers who liked the documentary collage. Philyaw’s prize-winning stories, gathered as The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, are the quickest route into this voice.
Final Thoughts
The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw is, in the end, a book about a woman who has to get naked in front of a live television audience before anyone will take her word for anything. The Proverbs 31 woman she has been measured against for eighteen years is praised for industry and silence. Scharisse abandons the first and keeps none of the second.
It is baggy, it over-explains its own conclusion, and it loves its footnotes past the point of use. It is also the funniest serious novel about respectability and its bills in years, and it lets none of its institutions off. Read it for the aunt in the sauna.