The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

The unnamed protagonist in “Not-Daniel” is a woman whose mother is in hospice care for ovarian cancer. She finds herself carrying the burden of being the dutiful daughter, with her mother at the end of her life while also taking care of practical things like insurance and bills and talking to relatives. She is in a state of limbo, waiting for the day her mother passes, grieving and worrying, needing comfort. She finds familiarity and comfort in a stranger whose mother is also dying of cancer in the hospice center; they have sex in the car after they leave their mothers, seemingly the only two people who understand what the other is going through.

The moral complexity of the situation is set aside in the quest for comfort in grief.

This character is not religious, though she and Not-Daniel both have Christian mothers. Through their interaction, Philyaw draws the comparison of comfort through religion to comfort through a meaningless sexual encounter.

Olivia is a girl who, for the first decade of her life, puts all of her trust in her mother. She doesn’t question any of her mothers’ decisions or the decisions of the adults in her life. She believes that the pastor of her church is God himself. She takes what is given to her and understands that she can’t ask for too much. As she gets older and wiser, she begins to see some of her mothers’ choices and disagrees with them. Still, she cannot say much to her mother out of respect, but she does not like them. She begins to make decisions for herself and becomes more independent. In certain situations, she is like a pawn for her mother and the pastor, but by the end of the story, she asserts her own moral compass and sees that it’s time for her to start making her own decisions. 

Arletha holds many conflicting truths inside of her. She hates living in a place where ice and snow are so persistent. She grew up in the South where the air is warm, and the climate is much more forgiving. She lives in the city with her partner, Rhonda, and she works at a university as a professor. She finds herself missing home all the time, aching for the familiarity. She deals with the fact that she misses her mother even though her mother can’t actually accept her wholly for who she is and who she is with. She struggles with finding a sense of “home” in a place that feels nothing like home to her. She looks to her partner to try to build a home in her.

Arletha is the opposite of Eula. Despite embracing who she is as a lesbian, she still finds that she cannot live true to herself because of the obstacles that gay people still face. She still cannot live in the South where she longs to be, and she still can’t find acceptance with some of the important people in her life, namely her mother. Philyaw reveals through Arletha that even embracing who you are holds its own challenges, while through Eula we learn that denying who you are is ineffective and hypocritical.

Lyra begins the story as a self-doubting woman who doesn’t believe that she deserves good things. She repeatedly self-sabotages a blossoming relationship with a physicist that she met at an education conference. She realizes that she doesn’t feel at home in her body and that it’s time for her to get to know herself before entering a good relationship. She spends time with her body and works against all of the shameful thoughts she was taught to have about herself and her body by the church. She comes out of this time period a much more confident and freer woman who is able to have a happy, sensual, healthy relationship with a good man. Through Lyra, Philyaw explores the restrictions that religion places on the female body.

Jael is a young girl who carries many generations of trauma inside of her without knowing it. She is described by her grandmother as “full of debate, deceit, and malignity” (125-26). Her grandmother doesn’t believe that she can show true affection. She is definitely different from other girls her age, and she’s also attracted to girls, not boys. She suffered the death of her parents as a young child and bears the burden of that reality as a teenager. She is not interested in God but has a fascination with the preacher’s wife. She keeps things to herself and is unpredictable.