42 pages • 1 hour read
Deesha PhilyawThe Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 6 Summary: “How to Make Love to Physicist”
Forty-two-year-old middle school art teacher, Lyra, meets physicist, Eric, at a STEAM conference. She spots him as one of the few other Black people attending the conference, and they meet and begin to chat. The conversation flows and they have a lot in common. On the flight home from the conference, Lyra tallies all of the things that she and Eric have in common, but she also rationalizes away her desire to get to know him more and ends up deleting his phone number.
Eric persists in staying in contact with Lyra, even though she is not reciprocating at first. Through conversations with her therapist and sketch sessions, Lyra continues to think about Eric and tries to work through her tendency to talk herself out of good things. She finally calls him, which begins a very intimate long-distance relationship where they chat at night and into the morning. They talk about God, and they watch TV shows together, among other things. Lyra invites Eric to a solo art show that she is putting on in the Spring. As things progress, Lyra once again talks herself out of a good thing and blocks Eric’s number.
Lyra begins to work on her relationship with herself and her sexuality. She lets her body be free, she sleeps naked, she explores her body and what feels good to her. She makes her body feel like her home. She decides for herself to stop going to church with her mother after she’s chastised for not wearing a girdle and for having visible panty lines. She apologizes to Eric for blocking him by sending him a framed sketch.
He comes to meet her in person, and their time together is special. They kiss, have a dance-off, discuss Rumi and black holes and fate, and eventually undress each other. Lyra finally feels comfortable and confident in herself and her body.
Story 6 Analysis
This short story is about a slow and difficult transformation; Lyra begins as a self-doubting adult woman who is crippled by shame. The Christian church she grew up attending and that her mother clings to are the source of this shame, especially regarding her body. Her body is not a home for her—it is not a source of trust or comfort, but of shame and guilt and embarrassment.
Lyra’s mother perpetuates harmful ideas about women’s bodies, teaching Lyra from a young age that in order to be chaste and righteous, she has to wear a girdle, to suck in, to make sure that her panty lines aren’t visible (109). In her quest for empowerment, Lyra says, “God forbid you are soft and unbridled” (108), sarcastically stating the ridiculousness that is trying to contain a body and make it something that it’s not. Lyra’s mother is obsessed with the exclusivity of God and believes that “it will be a very small number” who will get to heaven and see the face of God.
Lyra wrestles back and forth with her sexuality; she usually “disappear[s] into [her]self to endure” sex and views it as a means to an end—to be touched, rather than to experience pleasure (107). She has inherited a sense of shame surrounding sex and her body, and this affects her confidence.
Slowly, she begins to reframe what religion means to her. She questions the small God that her mother believes in, and how that exclusivity could be a reality. She begins to let go of the rigidity of the religion that she grew up with and wants “the promises of a new religion” in her relationship with herself and with Eric (112). She sees her daily calls with Eric as “a kind of ritual” and imagines that when they finally meet up it could be “a kind of consecration” (106). This thought is thrilling and terrifying to her because all she’s ever known “of religion is that it demands more than you can ever give” (106).
Philyaw explores the idea of the body as a home through Lyra’s journey. At first, her body is not her home; it is something that needs controlling, taming, squeezing, and hiding. Over time, she realizes that she cannot enter a new relationship with this attitude, so she distances herself from Eric for a time so that she can focus on herself. She ditches “the girdles [her] mother taught [her] to wear to harness [her] belly, [her] butt, [her] thighs, [her] freedom” (108). She sleeps naked, takes luxurious showers, studies the “contours and curves of [her] body, [her] topography (108). She studies herself without judgment in an effort to find home in her body. Philyaw writes “as your body begins to feel like a home, your courage grows” (109). This journey of self-love allows Lyra to be open to a good relationship and have confidence and comfort in herself.
