THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF FIRST LADY FREEMAN, by Deesha Philyaw
In February 2024, a woman named Tareasa Johnson, better known as ReesaTeesa, captivated the internet with her 52-part TikTok series, “Who TF Did I Marry?,” which chronicled her marriage to a compulsive liar. Johnson was stunningly self-aware, acknowledging the red flags she overlooked — his fake job, his unfulfilled promises — because, as a good Christian woman, she’d wanted to see her marriage through.
It was an all-too-familiar refrain: the noble, long-suffering wife for whom Proverbs 31 is a goal post, and who has built her life around a devotion to God and to her family. Deesha Philyaw’s first novel, “The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman,” is interested in the impossibility of that feminine ideal, and in what happens when one attempts, and inevitably fails, to meet it.
After 18 years of marriage to one of the most prominent megachurch pastors in America, Scharisse Freeman is ready to tell her story. “Forget the gossip and lies you heard about my alleged failures as a wife and what I did behind closed doors,” she declares at the start of the book, a romp whose light, comic tone and silly asides in footnote form belie the seriousness of its social inquiry. “I’m telling it just like it happened, protecting no one, least of all my damn self.”
That story begins at the 51st annual First Lady U.S.A. pageant in the fictional Belleton, Ga., an event for pastors’ wives that Scharisse, despite her husband’s ecclesiastical standing, has never been invited to participate in. She suspects it’s because of her upbringing: Raised by a single, “unchurched” teenage mother on the city’s lower-income East Side, she’s a far cry from the pedigreed women with generational wealth and a deep knowledge of church traditions.
And then there was the ill-fated trip to Hawaii 10 years ago, when she hosted a “‘Sacred & Sensual’ couples retreat sponsored by the Pure Passion sex toy company” that got her blacklisted from polite church society.
Scharisse is a theatrical narrator of her own extravagance: the mansion, the over-the-top parties, the yacht and Rolls-Royce, the wardrobe full of designer clothes. (She is also incredibly horny, and the novel seeps sex and desire; Philyaw has a talent for portraying this often hidden side of devout women.) Her prose is riddled with expletives, strike-throughs, asterisks and mock yoga breathing: “Inhale colossal disappointment and shattered pride, exhale salvation”; “Inhale you really did cheat this time, exhale did I though?”
Things have changed for Scharisse now that the pageant is under the new leadership of a pair of millennial twins who care more about spectacle than about old-school gentility. In a reversal of fate, she is now the front-runner for the crown, which she long hoped would bring her the acceptance she so desperately wants from the other wives.
And yet, instead of being overjoyed, on the eve of her crowning Scharisse starts questioning everything about the lavish life she’s built — mostly through a combination of church donations and brand deals — and its inability to protect her from harm, like secrets or betrayals.
The novel is structured like a circle, beginning at the end, so we know from the start that Scharisse will become disillusioned, and the next couple hundred pages take their time explaining why. We learn that much of Scharisse’s life is a carefully constructed performance of piety and fulfillment beneath which is a far more precarious reality: Her husband neglects her, pacifying her through gifts, and her teenage daughter resents her, often teaming up with her father to undermine her mother’s authority.
Scharisse comes to see that she is in a prison of her own making, that her belief in the safety of money and prestige comes at the cost of isolation and inauthenticity. She’s estranged from everyone outside the church’s approval, including her Aunt Marie, who raised Scharisse after her mother died when she was 12; and Petra, her childhood best friend who is both a lesbian and agnostic. Scharisse may have access, but she is powerless in the face of the church and her husband’s wishes.
Where Philyaw’s 2020 short story collection “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies” explored the dimensions of Black women’s yearning for a “reprieve from being good,” the novel turns this same idea of “good” inside out. Righteous acts and institutions are exposed for sacrificing moral truth for political gain. Characters use a constant patter of Scripture to justify their life’s contradictions.
“The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman” holds up a mirror to a community that is largely left out of the trad-wife conversation: socially conservative Black women who willingly maintain a patriarchy that subjugates them, leaving them at the mercy of their husbands. Scharisse is an everywoman ratcheted up to fever pitch, a madonna who can walk and talk and spend money but has none of the control she appears to. Her story raises the question: If even she has no autonomy in this system, who does?
THE TRUE CONFESSIONS OF FIRST LADY FREEMAN | By Deesha Philyaw | Mariner | 412 pp. | $32
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