If she’d told her family she had literary ambitions, she says, “I might as well have said I want to be Michael Jackson”. As a first-generation university student, Philyaw was “aiming to go to college and do something practical and make a lot of money”. She hadn’t always wanted to be a writer, I learn. Philyaw and I are speaking over video call: me in London, mortified to find I’ve got the writer up at 6am her in Pittsburgh, serene and cheerful, insisting that she is usually awake at this time anyway. There’s Eula, who insists on “saving herself” for marriage to a man, but happily celebrates her birthday each year by having sex with her female best friend there’s an unnamed bakery owner, implied to be an older Olivia from Peach Cobbler, who provides married men with a set of instructions before they begin an affair with her and there’s Lyra, who is forced to address the shame she feels around sex when she falls in love at the age of 42. The characters in Church Ladies, which has picked up a National Book Award nomination and won the PEN/Faulkner award, the LA Times book prize and The Story Prize in the US prior to its UK release this week, respond in different ways. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw.