An Exclusive First Look at Deesha Philyaw’s The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman
8 min readDeesha Philyaw spent two decades trying to get Scharisse Freeman to church.
It’s not that Scharisse didn’t want to be there. Scharisse would be a pastor’s wife, and not just any pastor’s wife, but wife to the pastor “of one of the largest Black megachurches in America.” She would be a “first lady,” a “Proverbs 31 Woman,” the “Beyoncé of evangelicals,” and the protagonist of Philyaw’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman. The problem wasn’t that Scharisse was unwilling to sit in church. The problem was, Philyaw tells me, that “I did not know how to write a novel.”
Raised in Florida, Philyaw studied economics at Yale University and education at Manhattanville College, and thus had no formal education in writing when she first decided to attempt drafting a novel, she explains. “I’ve always been a big reader, taking workshops and going to conferences and reading craft books,” she says. “I thought writing a novel makes you a real writer.” But the early version of Scharisse that Philyaw imagined back then was miserable; she hated being a megachurch’s first lady. That misery seemed to seep into Philyaw’s pages, and she struggled to get the book to “go anywhere,” she says. “As I later could articulate, there was not a lot at stake; there was not a lot happening.”
Instead, she pivoted to writing a book about co-parenting with her ex-husband, which the two of them released in 2013: Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce. Philyaw’s agent, who had signed with the author on account of Co-Parenting 101, asked Philyaw what was next. Another nonfiction title? Perhaps a novel? Philyaw admitted she had an idea—she had, in fact, already been working on that idea—but she kept getting stuck in the process. Her “hiatuses” from the novel started lasting years.
“At the same time, I was writing some short stories, and I didn’t really see the through line in the stories, but my agent did,” Philyaw says. These short fiction pieces each featured women of faith—women not unlike those Philyaw had grown up around, especially in the Florida church where her mother and grandmother had sent her as a child. Over the subsequent handful of years, Philyaw workshopped her short fiction, and those women became the titular “church ladies” in Philyaw’s debut short story collection, the acclaimed and bestselling The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
The collection went on to ignite Philyaw’s literary stardom: It became a 2020 National Book Award finalist, a Story Prize winner, a Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction winner, and an L.A. Times Book Prize winner. But Philyaw knew before Church Ladies was even published that the time had come to give Scharisse her full attention.
“I remember the day I turned in my manuscript to my publisher for Church Ladies in 2019, everything just crystallized for True Confessions,” she says. “I was ready. I was more experienced as a storyteller…I could really let go and let Scharisse be herself, let her love being a first lady and all the culture and lifestyle that I don’t love. And then [I could] snatch it all away from her, and really give her some problems to contend with, in the form of a scandal that breaks.”
The result of that newfound confidence is The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, Philyaw’s satirical debut novel, out September 29, 2026, with Mariner Books. True Confessions follows Scharisse as she enters the First Lady USA pageant, where she hopes to finally wrestle some respect out of “the other women” in her broader church community, the “daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters of pastors, deacons, assistant deacons, Sunday School teachers, and other proper churchfolk,” who “really don’t fuck with” Scharisse’s “Prada-and-stiletto steez”…not to mention her “unchurched” upbringing. But when Schar’s past comes back to haunt her—in the form of Philyaw’s aforementioned “scandal”—she discovers there’s only so much of her true self she’s willing to keep “locked up tighter than the Tiffany bracelets in my biometric safe.”
As ELLE is exclusively revealing today, the cover—with a jacket design by Yeon Kim and illustration by Carrie Graber—features the titular first lady in a green pinstripe suit, one leg slung across the throne on which she sits. That image, Philyaw says, was her idea: “Scharisse sitting on that throne with her leg thrown over and those red-bottom Louboutins, I could just see it. I wanted her to have a crown, and I wanted the crown to be a little askew because she’s not a straightforward traditional first lady. On the actual cover now, it’s on her knees and—without giving any spoilers—that fits, too. That was always my idea: that her posture, her body language, would tell the story.”
Ahead, Philyaw offers an inside look at the subjects that informed The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman; how The Secret Lives of Church Ladies influenced her approach; and what readers can expect from Scharisse, now that she’s finally ready to welcome us to church.
On growing up in the church
