August 2021 Meeting Transcript: The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Brandon’s note: In the past couple months, I’ve shed light on some of the stories in Book Club’s community. The post below is what actually happens when the Club meets to share their thoughts, feelings and experiences about and around a given month’s selection. This transcript of our August 2021 meeting is lightly edited, only to give the reader more of the rhythm of the room’s speech.

Yahdon:
Welcome to another installation meeting of the Literaryswag Book Club. I'm your host, Yahdon Israel. This is the eighth month of Book Club for this year. This is how many meetings we in now? 18 months in the pandemic and Book Club streak is still strong. Bless you Kara. Haven't missed a meeting. Can we get a round of applause for no missed meetings? Pandemic. This is just round of applause. This is, It's amazing. So any new members here today, new members, anybody first time? Oh, all the team is here.

Yahdon:
So this is probably going to be the first time I ain't got to do the whole backstory because everybody knows it. All right. So we get to just jump right in, but to jump right in, with this book. I wanted to do this book last year and I couldn't get in touch with the university press that published the book. So I wasn't able to do it when I wanted to do it but I stayed on it. Shout out, everybody a round of applause for Randy who was able to get me some email contacts that allowed this book to be a pick and also put me in contact, gave me Deesha's personal email which is going to be the reason why we come here today. Teamwork always makes a dream work. Randy is like the unknown MVP for this evening because between the email for the book and as well as Deesha, he helped make this possible.

Yahdon:
So shout out to Randy for that. I picked this book because as y'all know, and whenever I pick a book for Book Club, I'm constantly thinking not only just about the experience and the conversations I want us to have in Book Club but I'm thinking about what are the type of stories that gives us who come to Book Club, a way to sort of navigate the world outside of it. What are the type of books and stories that give us language to navigate the world outside of it? And I thought that like in connection with the conversation we had about Natalie Diaz's on "Postcolonial Love Poems" and we talked a lot about desire in the body and the way desire can, the way desire in that poetry collection, in many ways subverted the notion of what it means to deal with the wreckage of post-colonialism and colonialism. How us getting in tune with our bodies and what our bodies want could be a sort of roadmap for freedom.

Yahdon:
So I was like, yo, one of the things I remember when I read this book was how much of my own body was like reacting to the stories I was reading. I was like, oh this is, I feel this, these stories. It's not just, I like them and I understand them. It's like, I feel them like, like in my body and I was like yo, I wanted a book that we read... If you think about what we started with Book Club, remember we read "Medical Apartheid" which was one of the roughest books I've read in my life. But it was so much about what, how our bodies, how black bodies largely was a site of pain and torture for white practitioners. I think one of the things I wanted to bring is like how the body can be a site for pleasure and desire and joy.

Yahdon:
And with all the different things that this book provides, I think that it provided a lot of joy and a lot of pleasure in the body and like what it looks like when a woman desires, what she wants in the face of a society, in the face of religious practices and histories of a world that tells them they should not want what they want, right? Because I think something I appreciate about this collection is not romanticizing desire as though desire should only exist when there's an absence of adversity but what does desire look like in the presence of it? And how do people go about pursuing their desires for themselves and how do they achieve it? So I was like yo, this was just a fire book, which led to the prompt. Now this is probably going to be the most grown-up adult book club prompt we've ever had in terms of just the prompt, which was looking at every story, every story engages the body in very direct terms, right?

Yahdon:
And what I loved about it is literature as a practice with all the ways in which literature gets at the interior life, the emotions, the feelings, the soul, the spirit, the mind and the heart. There's very little books that get to and when I say very little I mean like the amount of books published versus the amount of books that do it and to do it well, books that get to the body. And so like create language for the way we inhabit our bodies, the way we fit, the way we feel, the way our bodies feel and the way it feels to be touched and touched by somebody and so I wanted to, the prompt for the night was where in your body do you feel desire when it occurs, and a reason why? And it's like your answers, your answer.

Yahdon:
What I noticed in reading this book was I was getting more in touch with what my body does at certain moments. Like what part of my body responds when I'm scared, what part of my body responds when I'm angry, what part of my body responds to different reactions. And I know as a black man who's raised in a particular framework, so much of how I grew up was deadening what my body felt like. Like oftentimes I moved through life not feeling my body. So when someone asks you how you're doing, or how you feeling, it was always cool. I'm like, I'm cool or I'm fucked up but those aren't feelings, right? Like that's like a state of being and so like this book was a way of helping me think about the connection between desire in my body. So that's the prompt. I'm going to type it in the chat.

Yahdon:
Where in your body do you feel, and I'm going to say typically so like where do you typically feel desire when it arises? Typically you feel desire when it arises. And on the subject, I put it in the introduction email, not introduction but when I talked about the book, there's this brilliant James Baldwin documentary, I'm going to put the link in here called Baldwin's Nigger with him and... James Baldwin and Dick Gregory and he was talking about how Christianity in many ways served as the point of disconnection between Africans in their bodies and not just Africans but just indigenous folk. Anybody who was converted in a violent way, the first thing it did was disconnect us from our bodies. And so I also thought that this collection was subversive out of using Christianity as a site for a way to grapple with what it means to reckon with your faith in something larger but then also this belief that there is something more than a hereafter and something more immediate than a hereafter that you can have your you know heaven on earth, so to speak.

Yahdon:
So I'll go first with this question. And when I thought about this question, something I realized is that whenever I desire something, my mouth waters and it doesn't have to be food or anything sexual, I could look at a pair of Gucci shoes and my mouth will water. I can look at a pair of leather pants and my mouth will water. I can look at a book I want to acquire and my mouth will water. And before reading this book, I never thought about what, like how those things are connected. And I think something that I realized and even thinking about desire is that there was a lot of times in my life where... How do I say this?

Yahdon:
I realized the way I deprive myself, like anybody used to do this thing where like you were mad at your parents, you didn't eat like to kind of like, I'm not eating your food, I don't need this shit. I'll starve. I realized that a lot of my deprivation came through food and drink because that was like my only form of resistance against what I felt was like an oppressive household. And so I realized that when my mouth waters it's tapping into that person who wanted to eat but then also wanted to prove a point. So I realized like in reading this book, like there's a way in which my body is telling me what I want and I have a bodily reaction to it. So that was my sort of insight that I came to read in this book. So keep it going, Alejandra, it's on you.

Alejandra:
I think I feel like kind of in the pit of my stomach in a similar way that I feel guilt and that's probably something that I should take up with my therapist.

Yahdon:
I feel that. Alex?

Alex:
I was trying to decide whether I wanted to say my stomach or my brain? And I think a lot of the way that I was trying to think...

Yahdon:
What part of your brain do you feel it though? Front head, side head, back?

Alex:
It's when I dream and I wake up and I write down my dreams, because basically the way to explain this I think is I would read the story, peach cobbler and I was like crying. I really related to it, it really explained a lot about my mom and me and especially me and food. And I think though, I often thought like what I do with my stomach when I feel like I want to like put things in my stomach is really to try to ignore everything that's going on in the brain, which like probably wants to tap into but the other part of me is like way too scared, and I can't really tell sometimes trying to figure it out.

Yahdon:
Okay, thank you. Andrea, where do you feel desire in your body where typically like more times than not?

Andrea:
For me, I think it would be my skin. Like I know when I'm not getting something I want especially like with people, I feel cold or if I am getting something I want, I'm always more sensitive to touch. But yeah, like good or bad skin.

Yahdon:
Okay, okay. Ashley?

Ashley:
Me, right?

Yahdon:
Yeah. Ashley Anna.

Ashley:
So for me, this is something like I've actually talked with my therapist and everything. It's my throat, to the point that like, I have something that like, when I'm anxious, like my muscles like tense up, I've gone to doctors, it's a whole thing. But it's mostly because I grew up like in a super religious household and like I'm gay and like all of that. So it was the fact that I couldn't speak. So something like being vocal is always part of desire for me you know, vocalizing my desire, vocalizing anything that I wanted to say. So I always feel everything, anger, love, everything is always in my throat that it's like a physical thing at this point. And I related to this book in so many ways so thank you for choosing this.

Yahdon:
Christina It's on you.

Christina:
I would say maybe my chest, like feeling kind of increase of like pulse a bit, maybe either from excitement, either from just overthinking some as well. But yeah I think that increase in pulse.

Yahdon:
Okay, the chest.

Yahdon:
Christy?

Christy:
I'm kind of torn between my gut and little throat too because like everything I feel in my gut, like if it's desire or anger or anxiety or even just laughter like a belly laugh, but then I also kind of feel it as those what I'm feeling you know, down in my gut like comes out of up to my throat and sometimes I vocalize it and sometimes I don't so.

Yahdon:
Hmm, okay. Thank you. Dana its on you homie.

Dana:
I would say it's the mix between my crown being my head or my heart. I'm an over thinker and I'm very passionate, so it's one of the other for me. Not like my crown is at ease.

Yahdon:
Okay. Who we got next? Dev?

Dev:
I'd say like, just like how relaxed my body is. You know I feel like when I really desire something like my body is relaxed. It's usually my shoulders, I can really tell.

Yahdon:
Okay. So your shoulders relax. Dope, dope. Diana?

Diana:
Hi. I think when I desire something, I always need to touch it. So I guess it's in my hands. Like if I see like a beautiful flower or like a plant or tree, or if it's like a beautiful painting, which I can't always touch but like, or like a really cool wall or a door, like even if it's a person that, like I enjoy with, I just I need to touch whatever I desire sort of complete the feeling and like I don't know.

Yahdon:
But where do you feel the desire in your body though typically?

Diana:
It's almost like straight to my hands or like, I need to like, yeah. It's almost like it becomes an intuitive thing that like if I desire it, I need to touch it.

Yahdon:
Okay. Dope, thank you. Errol, it's on you.

Errol:
I'd say where I feel desire the most is probably like the sides of my hips.

Yahdon:
All right now.

Yahdon:
Yeah you don't need to explain I don't know if you want to explain that or you just want to let that go? You just want to keep moving?

Errol:
I'm not quite sure how to explain it. I mean other feelings like fear or embarrassment or guilt. I feel like that's sinking in my gut but desire specifically like in the hip bones, I just kind of feel it there.

Yahdon:
All right. So you go to dinner, you start just doing a little shimmy with your hips.

Errol:
Somewhat yeah.

Yahdon:
When we're going out to dinner I want to see this brother, like test this theory. Eunice, it's on you.

Eunice:
Okay. I'm like the rest of the ladies who talk about their gut. You get these butterflies and all of a sudden you get tense and then I have to relax but it's interesting, everybody talks about skin, hand. I guess It all depends on what that issue is because I know when I get nervous, it's in my stomach but when I'm really direct, I'm sweating right across my nose and I'm just there. But I guess I don't know. I mean it all depends for me.

Yahdon:
So okay. So the question is particularly like when you desire something, part of what the question is doing is like, how do you connect those in different ways, intellectual and emotional responses?

Eunice:
Then It would be my gut. Yes.

Yahdon:
Dope, thank you. George, on you.

George:
I would have to say my eyes because they're a blessing and a curse. Sometimes people misread it and so it doesn't get the message across that I want but then someday like, I can't really see myself when I'm expressing my visual through my eyes but then it's like, it's expressing a sadness when it's not the intent, expressing something positive, when that's not the intent. So I would say it's in my eyes that I get lost in trying to communicate the desire and then it ends up impacting the rest of my body.

Yahdon:
Okay. So just to be clear when you feel desire not when you express it, but when you feel it, you feel it in your eyes?

George:
Oh it's absolutely visual. I'm very visual. We can get into that later.

Yahdon:
All right. The smolder in your profile picture makes sense now brother. I get the smolder now. Gerald? Gerald it's on you. Gerald and Alyssa.

Gerald:
So for me, I feel you Andrea on the skin, but particularly what I find myself is my fingertips.

Yahdon:
Okay.

Gerald:
And I think it fits is like, yeah. And what I find myself when feeling desire, I like I'll rub my tricep area or my chest or my shoulders. Those are like three which also coincides with like erogenous zones as well but those are like, my finger tips is like the main point. But you know like the moment where like, you're just like the area where your skin touches to the fingertips.

Yahdon:
I like that, the area and that was language right there brother, appreciate you.

Alyssa:
I got you.

Yahdon:
Alyssa on you.

Alyssa:
I think for me, like other people have said, it starts in my sacral chakra or like the gut or right below my belly. But I think if it's like sexual desire, it like quickly flows like downward and then if it's more like a desire that I don't know, like something that I like feel nervous about or anxiety about...

Alyssa:
Like something that I feel nervous about or anxiety about. It will quickly flow to like right here. And I often feel like a pulsing, right like below my breast bone.

Yahdon:
Alejandro's face when you said that she was like, hmm.

Gerald:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
You like one of those teachers that's like "Oh, okay. That's where we're going. Okay."

Alyssa:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
Gilah, how are you?

Gilah:
I think like Alyssa said towards the end, the heart chakra area. I think that's sort of, like a lot of people have said, most of their feeling is concentrated in a particular area and for me, it's the heart chakra. It could either be desire where it feels a little bit more light fluttering, like a butterfly feeling. Or sometimes I'll confuse that with anxiety. But I'm learning that that feels a little bit more tense, constricting, like closing in on that heart chakra, but it's usually starts here and will flow other places, but centered around that chakra area.

Yahdon:
All right, good. Thank you. Jake.

Jake:
Yeah. When you threw this out, I can't think of like the initial place. The only thing I can think about is, as soon as I feel that feeling afterwards, it's in the front of my head. Because I just overthink things and I'll try and talk myself out of something, and I'll go in loops and loops. And so I know I just feel that in the front of my head, but now I got to next time I desire something, like think about it and capture that feeling.

Yahdon:
The irony of the feeling brother, you're not supposed to think, you're supposed to feel it. I'm joking. Kara.

Jake:
I know haha

Yahdon:
Kara, did you go?

Kara:
Me? No, I'm here.

Yahdon:
Oh, all right.

Kara:
Just my puppy's biting me.

Yahdon:
Yeah.

Kara:
So I want to be different, but kind of like all the women have said, definitely in my gut. But also I realized that it's also anxiousness. So, like desire lives in my gut, but it's always kind of combined with this sense of like anxiousness as well.

Yahdon:
All right. Kenney, on you man.

Kenney:
All right. So, this is a tough one actually for me. I think that by large, it's probably my heart fluttering a bit with the anticipation of that thing, whatever it is. It could be going for a great run, some good music that's coming out. So, I think that the heart, feeling it pumping the blood a bit. Yeah.

Yahdon:
Thank you. Kenyatta.

Kenyatta:
I would say two places. One, my head definitely because I tend to just kind of process the feelings and kind of analyze where I am in that space. And then I would say once I kind of analyze it, I would say second are my cheeks, because then I tend to be more jovial, I'm smiling more and than what I smile a lot my cheeks tend to hurt. So, head and cheeks.

Yahdon:
Okay. Kourtney.

Kourtney:
I feel like I got to go with Gerald. Like, if I see a fire pair of shoes but I'm hesitating and going back and forth, then if I'll visualize it, if I really wanted it I'll visualize it or I'll see them everywhere.

Yahdon:
Oh, you mean George? We're seeing this.

Kourtney:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
It's in your eyes. Okay. Kristen, you know the prompt?

Kristen:
Yes.

Yahdon:
Okay, cool. Cool. Cool. What you got?

Kristen:
It's good to see you.

Yahdon:
It's good seeing you as well. Where are you? Oh, you on the other page. Okay.

Kristen:
I'm on the other page. I feel desire in my cheeks. I get pink. I get flushed, probably when I saw you and, I saw Yahdon you guys out in the wild. That was really fun. Like when was that, a week ago or something?

Yahdon:
In Dumbo.

Kristen:
That was like super startling. Yeah. Yeah. But I just blush when I'm in like various scenarios, whether it be desire, or shock or whatever emotion. Yeah. I get pink.

Yahdon:
I think I'm one, as I'm hearing these answers, I wonder what it means when the site of desire is also the site of so many other feelings as well. I feel like I wanna get into that. This is going to be a fire meeting. Maggie. What about you?

Maggie:
I am hearing a lot of things from other people. I feel it in my breath. So I guess my chest, especially if it's a piece of art, or music, or someone you see, like has a beauty to it, it's almost like an intake of breath but then it goes somewhere else. And I wonder if there's a little bit of like a permission in that, where you have to stop and take a breath, or just stop to react to what you're seeing or feeling.

Yahdon:
Right. Okay. Thank you. Miwa.

Miwa:
I'm laughing a little bit because I'm exactly like Maggie, it's all breath for me. That's the thing that I notice. It's like my breathing changes completely and it always just starts-

Yahdon:
Does it increase or does it decrease?

Miwa:
It decreases.

Yahdon:
Oh, okay.

Miwa:
It decreases. It's just like, oh, I can just, it might be a sharp intake of breath, but then it's just, I mean I've given myself the hiccups reading because I end up holding my breath and not even knowing I'm doing it. So, whichever direction the breath goes, mostly it's like being super chilled but there are also times where I'm just like, yeah, I just gave myself the hiccups, okay. I did it last night in fact, I totally gave myself a hiccup when I was reading something, it's really annoying.

Yahdon:
Nuratu, yeah.

Nuratu:
I guess this is the breath part of the prompt because I feel the same. I feel like I have to remind myself to breathe after a few seconds because I'm just, very much have my breath taken away.

Yahdon:
All right. The breath. That's the chest. Randy.

Randy:
Look at me, I'm acting like one of the faculty members at school talking with the mute button on. It's definitely for me in two places, at the top of my head and my chest. And, I experienced that earlier this morning when I was looking at those Le Creuset braisers online. And I know I want it, but the price isn't right yet so, I got to wait. I got to wait.

Yahdon:
Ricca.

Ricca:
I think it's definitely my skin, like when I go to a concert and then I feel, I get very easily moved by music, especially if it's live. And I get the chills, like the hair on my arms stands up. So, it's definitely my skin for me. I get the chills, I think.

Yahdon:
Okay. Sarafina.

Sarafina:
I'm really similar to some of the recent folks sharing that they feel like they're catching, I feel like I'm catching my breath in my chest when I desire something. And then the next thing I notice is, maybe my mouth is watering a little bit.

Yahdon:
All right. Real stuff, real stuff. Sarah.

Sarah:
I feel it in my chest, like a, not a yoke, but I feel it in my chest and my shoulders, and the back of my neck, and then my hands. I feel it in my hands and I need to sit out for a second. Just, take a breath.

Yahdon:
All right. Who else? No, Sarah went. No, is there two Sarah's? Oh, you just shortened your name. Abby.

Abby:
I'm thinking about this as I'm hearing people talk, it's definitely my face.

Yahdon:
Okay.

Abby:
I would say definitely, I blush and flush way too quickly.

Yahdon:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mike.

Mike:
Hello?

Yahdon:
Yeah. We're here. Where do you feel desire?

Mike:
What's going on with the, I got to tell you man I'm trying to get the Zoom link, I was trying to get it from you. It still is not working, but-

Yahdon:
You got to give me another email because I'm sending everything the way everybody else, I'm going to need another email.

Mike:
Yeah, we don't know man. We don't know, that why I text you. I just couldn't get into, I've been sitting here trying to get in and can't get in. But for me it'd be my chest, either my chest and my lower back. But, I really like have chest pains anytime something arises in me. So, I feel-

Yahdon:
Your lower back?

Mike:
Yeah. Everything goes kind of to the spine, but mainly just my chest area. It'll get tight, whether I'm happy or upset, or sad or whatever. I'll get, like develop chest pains. Especially if I'm angry, or sad, or whatever it may be.

Yahdon:
Thank you for that. All right. Did anybody not go, or just joined late? Tsahai did you go? No, Tsahai.

Tsahai:
I feel it in my chest and the back of my neck. Like a warmth, I guess my blood starts to, and I'll get like a warm feeling right across my chest and the back of my neck, feel like flush.

Yahdon:
Okay, cool then. So, thank you all. Did everybody go? Because if somebody came in after, wouldn't be. But, thank you all for sharing. So, which story we want to talk about first? Which one, which you all want to jump into? Is it Peach Cobbler? Should we stop there? Should we, I see the nods. I see the nods. Okay. Where's my... So Dana, I saw your face. What did you want to talk about? What do you want to...

Dana:
That's actually, I mean I want to discuss that one, but that story didn't speak to me as mostly as How To Make Love to a, was it Physicist?

Yahdon:
Physicist.

Dana:
Right. But Peach Cobbler, for sure spoke to me because again, like the entire book, just a discussion of separating religion from your desires, whether it be sexual or your life desires. Growing up in the church, you're not allowed to speak about certain things, you're not allowed to look a certain way. It's be seen or what is it, be seen and not heard, you have to be invisible in a sense. So, the way she attached this God persona to this man, a lot of that brought back memories of being in the church, and the pastor or the deacons. We look at them as if they're holier-than-thou. They are the gods, and they're so religious and they know everything, and God speaks to them. And as someone who went through certain traumas at a certain age, by somebody who was highly esteemed in the church, Peach Cobbler spoke to me because they're regular men, they each sit and bleed the same way everybody else does. And sometimes those ones who are Bible thumping are the ones most evil. That's how I took that story.

Yahdon:
One of the things, what I thought was masterful about the storytelling, I'm excited for Deesha to get here, is how she use the Peach Cobbler. And Eunice, you touched on this too, was like, as a symbol for so many things at the same time. How the Peach Cobbler symbolized sexuality and was like a metaphor for, I took it to be a metaphor for sex. Like, my mother's peach cobbler is the best in town, but then it was also like, I saw it as a metaphor for womanhood when the daughter started learning how to make the peach cobbler. And she has that line, where is it? Oh man. I think I underlined it when she said that maybe she'll give some of her peach cobbler to the pastor when he comes over. I said, "Oh, her mother going to beat her ass, she tried to do that." Don't do that. You don't be just doing that.

Yahdon:
But I thought that from a storytelling standpoint, how Deesha used the Peach Cobbler as a way to talk about old, like not to just but, one of the things I find difficult, and I don't know how many people read short story collections, but when I typically read short stories, is the ability to capture the tension in a story and to sustain that tension over the course of the entire story. And, to have this Peach Cobbler have an evolving meaning over the course of like, that story took, it was like probably 14 years or something like that. Because it starts when she's a kid and then she's a young adult, I think she's at least a senior in high school. And the fact that that Peach Cobbler both tethered the mother to the daughter in a very particular way, but that relationship had changed with her learning how to make it.

Yahdon:
And I just thought like, oh, this is like watching the way in which I'm watching a younger girl come into her womanhood under a woman who has power over her. And how is she exerting her own agency, and it's through this peach. I just thought, it was just ill and how Deesha executed that. And so from a storytelling standpoint, I also just was like, I saw it visually. This could be a Netflix episode or something. I don't, like I could visualize this being like a thing. Gerald. I mean not Gerald, my fault, Gerald. George, is on you.

George:
So to me, all the stories were very interesting. I mean all went from Dear Sisters to the very last story about Levert. But the thing that, and I was talking to my daughter about reading this book, first of all I was very engaged with the book. And you going to have a question for you after I make this observation. And I grew up in the church. I grew up in a single parent household with a woman, and I grew up with young women whose mothers may have been evangelist or some part of the church. And I think that the church has been very, good and bad for the black woman, is what I told my daughter and she totally agree. And she's not even as involved in the church as I am. But, when you think about all these stories, the woman has always been in every single one of these stories, women were always at a disadvantage in some capacity with these men in the church.

George:
And I'd seen it growing up in the south, growing up where like, a woman's role and what it means in a church so, that was interesting in every single story. I cracked up on some and I thought about my mom and the way she is today. And then some of those young women I grew up with who became extremely promiscuous and had multiple kids. And, then the older people used to like touch them if they wore a skirt that was just a little too short. My question and that's observation, so now my question for you, in my book vote, this is going to be my favorite book of the year, why was that, I cracked up when I read that.

Yahdon:
The reason why, and I wrote that in some people's books, it was a feeling, it wasn't even like an intellectual reason. It was just like I just, sometimes I just have a feeling and the reason why I think, if I'm thinking about why I wrote that on a deeper level, I think because to watch your emotional response to like the Medical Apartheid on how rough it was for you to read that. I felt like to have a book that was on the complete opposite spectrum where like, I hear what you're saying. And I'm going to go to Alex and then who else raised their hand? But one of the things I also thought about the book was like, I don't think that the book portrayed power in this very static way. Like, men had IT and women didn't. I think that the way in which power unfolded in these stories was very nuanced and very complicated. So like that story, which one is it?

Yahdon:
Jael, for example, where shorty blows homie up this, she just blew homie up, like just killed homie. That was a story where it's like, you got this dude taking advantage of these young girls in the neighborhood. And homey, it doesn't even occur to homie that she's capable of that type of action. And I've heard from different women like, "Do men realize that women can, we can kill y'all?" I've heard this from like, "Y'all will follow us, you all will let us in your houses. Y'all will go to sleep, you don't know us." And it's like, "Do you all realize that we can kill y'all?" And a story like, Instruction for Married Christian Husbands, was like an ether of ethers in terms of, I don't want to be saved.

Yahdon:
I don't want you, I just want what I want from you. And so, one of the reasons why I thought you going to enjoy it is because I think you are somebody who I come to understand, like I think appreciates subversive stories simply because I think so much of how you think about things are like, you like to be challenged. So, that's what I thought, George. That's why I...

George:
And just one point you made and I want to make sure it's clear. I wasn't saying men having more power than women in these stories-

Yahdon:
Yeah.

George:
But it's just women being at a disadvantage, in every single one of these stories, just like women have been at a disadvantage in their church. Even if you used the story with Jael, I mean, if you think about to kill another human being and to see the things that were done to other women, it just seems like women, and again, I'm just speaking from my own observation and-

Yahdon:
Right.

George:
Growing up just how women have always had to deal with challenges. And I've known a woman who, and like a very, very, very close relative of mine, who dated a married man and that story about how to, about the married man. Like, she would know that story left and right. So, that's the only thing I wanted to make clear. It wasn't about power.

Yahdon:
Yeah.

George:
It's about being at a disadvantage.

Yahdon:
Okay. I respect that. I respect that. Alex, then Kenney, and then Ricca.

Eunice:
So, how do you hold your hand up?

Yahdon:
Oh you could just, the bottom panel, you're going to see the button reactions and then it says, raise hand. You should see it. And if you can't find your raise hand reaction just type the exclamation point in the chat, as it works just as well. Alex it's on you.

Alex:
When you were talking about the Peach Cobbler as a metaphor, something that I really thought of was a few things. Like, one of Olivia's big desires is like she says, "I just wanted my mother." Or, "I wanted the currency of care from my mother." And also it seems like the Peach Cobbler is kind of like representing pieces of the mother herself, but it's like something that's literally sweet, and good and represents affection for another person. And also, the mother's very capable of making peach cobbler and giving it to people she wants to give it to. I don't know, something that I was so heartbroken by was when she's caught eating it out of the trash and the mom's like, "What makes you think you were", I mean she doesn't say it in these words, but she's basically like, "Why do you feel entitled to this?"

Alex:
And she's just saying, "I just wanted to try it." And then the mom so pointedly telling her, "It's not for you." I just feel like, I don't know. I really read into it as, like the daughter desiring this thing that was so frustrating because it was like just beyond reach. It wasn't like she couldn't imagine her mom, it wasn't like her mom was physically not there or not there in some other senses, because I feel like she could see the promise of her mom's capacity to give love. And it's really, yeah. I don't know, those are some of the thoughts that came to my mind. I don't know if that's like too literal, like, oh, this man is eating peaches of her cobbler.

Yahdon:
That's the new slang now.

Alex:
Like she's imagining the juice dripping down on her mom when she sees the pastor and she's so angry. My opinion, I was like, well, that sounds like jealousy too.

Yahdon:
Yeah. And, as you said that something that to me was evident, and this came from years of reading, and talking and reflecting, men are in these stories, but they're not about the men. That's how I read it. Men play a role, but it's not about them. Like, Peach Cobbler for a perfect example, is about the mother and her daughter. So even when the mother sends the daughter to the house, I'm now going to lie, I thought that the son of the pastor and her were siblings at a point. Because I thought that the pastor was her father and she didn't tell him, because he was like, "You don't need to know about your father." And I'm like, "Oh Lord, don't let this be an incest scene." So that was just something that was, but Deesha told me me that wasn't the case. But on the notion of that, Jael with the friend, what was the friend's name? And Jael, what was the name? Was it Katura?

Yahdon:
Like, that relationship was about the friendship. So many of these stories were not about the men, which is oh, oh, Deesha about to enter into the chat you all. So, I'm going to just let her in and we can just bring her in now. Where are you at Deesha? Where's she at? Where's she? No. Keep your hand up, Mike. Don't put your hand down. We going to keep it, Deesha, where are you at? How are you doing? Can you-

Deesha:
I can hear you.

Yahdon:
All right. Well welcome.

Deesha:
Thank you.

Yahdon:
Can we all just unmute? We was in the middle of the discussion when you pulled up, can we all on mute our cameras and give her a warm book club welcome.

Deesha:
Thank you. Thank you so much.

Yahdon:
Right. Thank you for joining us. So just to keep, bring you up to speed, we had just finished the prompt. So, we were talking about where in your body do you feel desire when it arises? And so people had different answers. Mines was my mouth watering, and other people's was like their stomach, their shoulders, their fingertips. Have you thought about the question? And if so, where do you feel desire when you, we're grown here, everybody's grown. So some of the answers was also below the belt, but you know, that's what it is, if that's what it is.

Deesha:
Yeah. I got the question a little while ago, a couple of days ago. And immediately started thinking about it. Mine is below the belt. That was like, boom. I was like, good question, but I'm sorry my answer is so basic, but it is.

Yahdon:
And what we were talking about before you arrived is, we were talking about, at the particular moment I was saying how these stories managed to have men in them, but not be about men. And the way in which the men serve as a way for, the way I understood these stories as a way to show the relationships between women, and how women related to each other and what women want it from each other. Which even as a black man, it took me a while to read these like, it took me a lot of reading to even read it that way.

Deesha:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Yahdon:
Whereas before I'm like, I would have read it like, oh, it's always about a dude. As opposed to like, the dude is there but he's also like, he's a part of it, but he's not it.

Deesha:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
Was that, yeah.

Deesha:
I was not thinking about men. One of the first interviews I did about my book was with my friend, Damon Young. And Damon said, he had the best description I think, he said, "Men are garnished in this book." And I thought that was just perfect. And, I think it's important for men to read books where they're not centered, just like it's important for white people to read books where they're not centered. But I can't say that like I was, intentionally thinking about that. But I think that, that's one of the things that can be gleaned. When you read something, if I read stories about trans people as a cis person, I'm not centered. Like you reading it more than once. How do I read it as, here's someone who has a marginalization that I don't share. And, what's that experience like for me as a reader and what questions does it encourage me to ask of myself?

Yahdon:
All right. So, the way we go here it's an open form of conversation so-

Deesha:
Okay.

Yahdon:
You're going to benefit from it. You're just a part of a convo. You not even-

Deesha:
Works for me.

Yahdon:
Some people might ask some question, some people might just say some shit. That's how it goes down.

Deesha:
I'm ready. I'm excited.

Yahdon:
All right. So, Kenney, then Ricca, then Jake. Kenney it's on you.

Kenney:
Okay. I just echoing what Dana mentioned about that pastor God notion there, because I've seen it. And I grew up in the church too. When you see it with people, they almost like lose their own conscience, they lose own minds, and don't make decisions for themselves and look to the pastor and whatever he says is being right. So I thought about that pastor God piece. Also, I had a buddy who, he was a pastor, a good friend of mine. And he would talk about how the women would bake him cakes and, whatever. And they wouldn't even do it for their own family or their own husbands. So I just thought about that with the daughter and with this pastor. And also, I was thinking about this, I don't know if it's backwards thinking, but just the way that she stifled her daughters, expanding herself, going to a friend's home. Or maybe it was just simply her own insecurities and just projecting them on to her child, which may be what we all would probably do to our own offspring. You know what I mean? So, but that piece too was interesting.

Yahdon:
Interesting in what way? What interested you? Like, did it make you think about something or?

Kenney:
No, just the fact that she wouldn't let the daughter expand her view in saying that, what did she say? Gosh, I can't think of the exact words but, not to expect anything out of life? I don't want to miss that, exactly what you said Deesha there or meant to convey but, and not letting her go to this friend's house. Yes, she knew her parents, but so what? She gets to see a nice house, maybe she wants to live in a nice house when she grows older. Maybe she wants to be larger than the town that they're in. So, that was what I mean by interesting.

Yahdon:
Okay.

Kenney:
I wouldn't think I would want my, to expand and be more than, just see more than what I see in my mind. So...

Yahdon:
Let me ask, last question before I go to Ricca, then Jake, then Eunice. May I ask you this? What do you think would have to happen to a person when they think that wanting their kid to accept life as it is, is the best thing that they can do for their child? Like what would have to happen? Like, as you said it, like the way you said it you would like, I would never think that, I would want more for my kids. Right.

Kenney:
Right.

Yahdon:
Part of what I'm thinking about is, just that generational way in which parents believe that what they're doing is in the best interest. So that's why I'm asking you like, what do you think would have had to happen to the mother for her to think that by limiting, the way you see it on the outside would have been her doing the best for her child? Because in the mother's mind, she thinks she's doing right by her kid. Right. So that's why I'm like, what would you think would have to happen to shorty for her to think that way?

Kenney:
You know, that's a good question. Maybe for her to, that's a really good question. Maybe just her being, she sounded like a home body, she sound like someone who didn't get out much. Maybe getting out more, maybe seeing more, I don't know.

Yahdon:
Right, no I see. It's something to consider.

Kenney:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
Because that's what I-

Kenney:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
Appreciate you for entertaining that. Ricca, then Jake, then Eunice.

Ricca:
I feel like going back to what I guess we were originally talking about, it's hard for me to view this with a religious lens because I was not brought up religiously. My family was Jewish, but we were like hippie Jews, and I'm not going to go into detail about what that means. But, we didn't go to temple or anything. But I think it's like, to me, it's like the generational relationships between the mother and the daughter, and the daughter just kept surprising me. I just kept feeling like given the mother's experience, she's like a deeply troubled and person who has been hurt. And so she's like hurting her daughter, like hurt people, hurt people. But then the daughter just keeps defying that hurt to like make really good choices.

Ricca:
I was sure that she was going to sleep with the son of the pastor to get back at her mother. And like she did sleep with him, but it wasn't about that. And, it was on her timeline and like on her terms. And, I don't know. I wasn't expecting her to just like continue to make such good choices. And, I want to be her friend, so...

Yahdon:
Jake, and then Eunice.

Jake:
Yeah, I was kind of thinking back to what George had said

Yahdon:
Wait, are you breaking up? Is he breaking up for you all too?

Jake:
And-

Yahdon:
Hold on, you 're freezing up homie. Chopped and screwed. I don't know what happened. Hold on. Just yeah, come back. I'm going to come back to you. Eunice, this is on you.

Eunice:
About the daughter.

Eunice:
About the daughter. I think what I perceived was the mother was doing a protective thing. It was also selfish because she didn't want everybody know that she was sleeping with God. Remember? Well, according to the daughter. Of course, the guardian was so young, she didn't understand that. So that whole thing about the daughter and the mom mistreating her, mom was out there surviving and using the pastor to make ends meet. So when daughter says, "Hey, I want to go with my girlfriend's house." Well, she's right, because the kids don't want to come back and say, "What's over your house," and if you recall, I think the pastor's car was in the back. Right? I'm sure everybody knew what the-

Yahdon:
That's a double entendre right there.

Eunice:
Right?

Yahdon:
That works on many levels.

Eunice:
And the peach cobbler. To me, it's like that peach cobbler was for him. A lot of times back in the day, what did they put in that peach cobbler? Because it wasn't for no one ... the daughter couldn't eat it. No, she can't have that. There might've been some other stuff in there. Some love juices or something. That's how I seen it.

Deesha:
I grew up with men and boys being taught you never eat a woman's spaghetti and I'll leave it at that.

Eunice:
Exactly.

Yahdon:
What?

Dana Huggins:
That's definitely a West Indian thing. Yes.

Eunice:
But I didn't finish. I just had one other thing to say.

Yahdon:
Okay.

Eunice:
Well, Instructions For Married Christian Husband, I kind of relate. There was two stories. The "How to make love to a Physicist", those two. They were very comfortable with their bodies at that point, because I've been there too. You're like, "I don't know what this guy's doing," but then when you're with this guy ... In fact, remember the guy I told you, he called me up and says, "Hey, we can get married now," and his ex wife was in the kitchen. But we were so natural together and so we were talking about his wife or whoever else you dated, what have you, we could talk about everything. But you're comfortable with your body. And that's what the ... Let me see, the girl who made love to the physicist and the instruction to a married woman. You are in control. Listen, Negro, you going to do what I want? I've been there. This is what ... and you got to get out. So I've been there.

Yahdon:
Can I ask you a personal question, Eunice, real quick? Oh you said yes? Okay. What happened for you to get to that place where you were comfortable in your body?

Yahdon:
You muted yourself. I don't know if that was on purpose.

Eunice:
I did, didn't I? Sorry. What happened? The connection with different guys. Some guys you have connection with, some guys you don't and the ones you in control of, you just treat them like dummies. You know?

Yahdon:
So that helps you connect with yourself?

Eunice:
It's a connection with the guys. The one was the physicist, he was Dr. Warren Goode and he thought, "Oh, I'm going to be doctor. I'm going to have all the ladies in the world." I said, "Negro, you still broke. Who cares?" I mean, seriously. So we had that kind of relationship. I find that it was the guys that I was involved with that I can make that connection because they were also ... they put all cards on the table and I'm like, "Oh, okay." So you don't have this relationship. "Oh, I like you. You like me. I really don't know." But when you have relationship all cards out on the table, you know what you're working with. So that's how I got there.

Yahdon:
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Jake, then Mike, then Kristen.

Jake:
Sorry. I think I got my internet figured out, but I was just talking kind of on the point that George had earlier, about kind of the women's positioning in relation to men, and then the conversation about the absence of men in the story. I had read Brian Broome's, Punch Me Up to the Gods right before this and he makes a comment in there when he says that every problem he had, he needed a black woman to support him. He talked about kind of the pawning off of those problems into women and I couldn't help but laugh when I was reading the not Daniel one, and the narrator, I don't know if we got her name, was talking about kind of her needing to think through the same time while they're having sex in the car about whether their mothers died. She asked if he was worried about that. He said, "Listen, I can either deliver the goods or I can think about my momma dying or not. Can't do both."

Yahdon:
What page is that?

Jake:
Page 16.

Yahdon:
Okay.

Jake:
But I just thought it was amazing. The view of how strong women are, I think in relation to men, of handling these problems and having to do both things. I mean, this book talking about the freeing of them and them following their desires, but also their power in all these situations was really incredible.

Yahdon:
Mike, then Kristen and Deesha.

Mike:
Yeah. I was just going to talk about ... we were talking about the Peach Cobbler short story. I mean, I grew up in the church, so it's been a conversation that I've had recently with friends. I grew up Baptist, but a lot of the pastors, you see them come out with a lot of scandals nowadays and everyone's shocked, and just that relationship, which kind of was pointed out in the book from the pastor being referred to as God, driving around in this luxury vehicle, everyone almost worshiping certain pastors nowadays and considering them in relationship to God is really a conversation that I've had with friends because they end up sometimes losing faith or trying to figure out, "I attach almost all of my religion or my feelings and my development towards this person and now this person let me down."

Mike:
So that's been something I've been kind of talking about and thinking about, but really in the beginning in the peach cobbler article-

Yahdon:
The short story.

Mike:
I'm sorry. The short story. She talks about basically not questioning anything. "Without having to be told, I learned not to ask questions about the cobbler or about God. I learned not to say anything about him." Then what I thought was interesting was if you go towards the end of the short story, she's given the envelope because she was tutoring him. She throws it back in her mother's face and then she actually somewhat rejects and questions and they get in an argument and she saying like, "Don't talk to me like that. God don't like ugly." I just thought the story went full surface as far as her being in the very first pages knowing not to question anything.

Yahdon:
Oh.

Mike:
We're taught in some instances we don't question anything, especially in the church growing up. Baptist, we don't question anything, whatever the pastor says. Some people get hooked to that. Then she kind of grows in the short story. Towards the end, you see her and her mother get into a back and forth where she's almost saying it's not even worth it. She throws the envelope back, she rejects this. You can tell she's traumatized from it, from the whole experience. Basically her mother put her in this situation, if you will say. So that was just interesting to me how it went full surface.

Yahdon:
Kristen, and then Deesha, I'm going to give it to you after Kristen.

Kristin:
Well, first-

Yahdon:
I got you, Jumi. We see you.

Kristin:
I guess first I want to say thank you, Deesha, for an amazing body of work. It was so amazing to relish every word, and thank you, Yahdon, for obviously inviting Deesha and just thank you for the company and for tonight. So the question that I've been reflecting on was, Yahdon, your question of what did the peach cobbler represent and you kind of layered in the metaphor for sex, womanhood, when the daughter starts making it. To me, I grew up in the church and I kind of saw it as an offering, especially particularly because the pastor was mislabeled as God for so long. Right? So an offering is like a sacrifice for redemption, thinking that Jesus is your savior. It was almost like forbidden fruit in some ways as well, right?

Kristin:
Because especially that moment where the daughter is caught in front of the trashcan with the juice dribbling down and I just saw so many connections there and just something I wanted to point to was number 49. Just a reflection that I had on this was, well, first the quote saying, "I want it to be those peaches. I longed to be handled by caring hands. And if I couldn't, I wanted the next best thing, to make something so wonderful with my hands." I guess in Christianity, there's this concept of purification. Obviously humans are all filled with sin, through the redemption of Christ and through Jesus's blood, you are pure, you are saved. In a way, the peaches kind of reflected perfection in various ways. It was the best peach cobbler in the town and the daughter really yearned to be this perfection.

Kristin:
Then I really loved when the text went into, "To make something so beautiful." So she wanted to take control of this perfection because she couldn't taste and kind of be that offering to God. Then there was also another line, I think it was 71, which was, yeah, when she finally took it into her own hands, she created the peach cobbler and she brings it to Miss Marilyn and Trevor, "I tried to absorb all this goodness, but I didn't deserve it. I didn't even belong there, sullying her spotless home." So regardless of how she took her fate into her own hands of trying to emulate perfection and bring this offering, she couldn't absorb it herself. It was just a reflection of Christianity and how you believe you are saved through Christ, but then you're perpetually made to also feel like you're a professional sinner through the rest of your life.

Kristin:
So there's this feeling of always being unclean and always striving to continuously be saved with the remembrance of Jesus's death. So the last thing was the very end, which it was just like chef's kiss. The last page, 74. "There's nothing you can say to me about God ever, because you're the ugliest." Drop down to the line of saying, "I swear my life won't be anything like yours because it will be sweet and it won't be crumbs," and the crumbs tied back to this remnant of perfection and her almost accepting that she will be imperfect and owning her control of her autonomy, of her life. Yeah. And her own volition to just live. But then the last sentence, she had nowhere to go. It was just so touching and I love this story. I think that's all I wanted to say.

Yahdon:
Deesha, it's on you.

Deesha:
So first, I just have to thank you for inviting me. This is already the best conversation. I don't get to just listen like this. So thank you, Yahdon, and all of you for being here, for all of your kind words and just the very close way you're reading my stories. I just wanted to know a couple of things. Jake mentioned Brian Broome and Punch Me Up to the Gods. Brian is one of my dearest friends. He lives here in Pittsburgh too and we talk a lot. I tell him he's sexist all the time. We talk a lot about the reliance on black women and that sort of thing. So it's interesting that it came up in this conversation and Brian has a one-sided competition with me. So when I tell him that in my book chat his name and his book came up, I'm never going to hear the end of it, but I am going to tell him about it.

Deesha:
But I wanted to build on something Eunice said, and then Kristen touched on it too. When I finished Peach Cobbler, I was satisfied with that ending. I had a different ending a long time before that, changed it, made it that ending, and I felt like the ending worked. Then when I was working on the last story in the collection and I'm writing, which was ... The last story in the book you have is Eddie Levert, but the last story I wrote was Instructions. So I'm writing Instructions and I got to the part where the narrator who is not named is talking about herself and she says, "I own a bakery and I make the best peach cobbler in town," and I was like, "This is Olivia, this is Olivia all grown up." I didn't plan that, but I think that as much as I was satisfied with the ending of Peach Cobbler, I couldn't let Olivia go. I needed to know for better or for worse where she landed, and this is where she landed.

Deesha:
So the things that Eunice was saying about control, that narrator, who we now know is Olivia, is very much in control, and she brought the crumbs back, to Kristin's point. She talks about how she said she wasn't going to be like her mother, but here she is again eating the crumbs off another woman's table. So I just wanted to kind of share that connection point.

Yahdon:
Before I go ... You know what? Jumi, let me honor that. Jump in, girl. I'm going to ask my question.

Jumi:
Hi. Sorry that I came late. I was confused about the time difference. So there's a couple of things I wanted to say. One is the first story really reminded me of another story of read by Jewelle Gomez and I was super curious if Deesha had read it.

Yahdon:
What's the name of the story?

Jumi:
Let me just check again. It's about two black women who go have sleepovers when their grandmothers go to bridge club and they start hooking up with each other. Oh, okay. Here, I found it. It's called Shoes: A Biomythography.

Deesha:
Nope.

Jumi:
Shoes: A Biomythography by Jewelle Gomez. I was reading the first story, I was like, "This story is in conversation with that story. Did Deesha read this story?"

Deesha:
No. I know her work, but I don't know that story. I don't know if there was any religious overtones to her story.

Jumi:
There's not, but the other currents of this story are so close to the first story. I was like, "What the fuck is going on here?" In an exciting way. But so that's just something I thought that would be a cool carrot for you to look at.

Deesha:
I think it's a common experience, but I was talking to somebody who's a little bit older than me, he's early 50s, and he was lamenting the trend of bisexuality amongst young women.

Jumi:
I know when men say that.

Deesha:
He was like, "Back in our day, girls weren't doing this," and I said to him, "How would you know? How would you know?"

Yahdon:
What was his answer? What was his answer?

Deesha:
Touche.

Jumi:
But the other thing I wanted to bring up and I'm not sure, because I came obviously an hour late ... So I was thinking about the question that Yahdon asked about where does desire live in the body? I was thinking about that, but then I started thinking some other things as I was reading the stories. Because it's about desire, but ... So I always think with short story collections, there's invisible rules for the world of the collection, like what ties the stories together. I was thinking ... I mean, religion and desire are the easy themes to reach for. But I was thinking about secrecy because I was thinking black women have rooms inside of us that no one can touch. It feels like a room for requirement almost, like the things that we need reproduce in those rooms and no one gets to reproduce them without us and there's all kinds of secrets that we hold within those rooms in order to survive as black women.

Jumi:
I was thinking about Yula... What is the name of Yula's best friend? I keep forgetting her name.

Deesha:
Caroletta.

Jumi:
I was thinking about Caroletta and I was thinking about Renee, and then I was thinking about the mother and I was just thinking about the secrets they're asking other people to hold for them. Then I was like, "Why are secrets so real in this collection?" So I was raised in the church too and something that I think a lot of ... Well, one of the biggest things about being, at least in my experience, being religious, growing up in a religious family is that secrecy is really the foundation of prayers. When I'm having my most private moments, those are prayers. When I'm praying, that's a conversation I'm having, but sometimes it's not a conversation. Sometimes it's opening that door to that room and revealing a secret that would keep me out of heaven if it's still there when I die.

Jumi:
So when I talk to God, I'm saying everything that I have to say to be able to get in, because while I'm alive and I have these secrets ... and Christians, so much of Christian culture is about going in to pray and that prayer and prayer is a conversation. I was thinking a lot about these stories. So you wrote epistolary for Dear Sister and I love that story the most, but I was like, it's epistolary, but prayers are epistolary and why aren't all of the stories in their own ways prayers that the narrator is making to God in order to be able to make it? That's something I was thinking about.

Yahdon:
I'm going to ask you a question, Jumi, and I would like for you also, Deesha ... What was his name? So when you said the thing about desire, right? That's why I clapped my hand. Something occurred to me. When you were talking about the houses. I mean, the rooms. So there's this constant ... Anybody ever seen the 1952 version of Imitation of Life with Juanita Moore and Lana Turner. All right. So there's a scene in that movie, one of the most memorable scenes for me is ... there's is a scene where Juanita Moore ... So basically the book ... I mean, anybody heard of the movie is basically the story about these two women, they're both single mothers. One has a child that's mixed race who can pass for white, the other one is white woman with a white child.

Yahdon:
The black mother moves in with the white mother to help take care of her kids while the white mother goes on to become a Hollywood actress or something. That's the premise. There's a scene in the movie where Juanita Moore, the black woman who's taking care of the white woman's kid and her child, Lana Turner's kid, is rubbing her feet and they're talking and it comes up that Juanita Moore's character has friends and Lana Turner says, "Oh, I didn't know you had friends," and she goes, "Well, of course I have friends." And she goes, "well, where?" And she goes, "The barbershop, this place, that place." Then Lana Turner goes, "Well, you never told me," and she said, "Well, you never asked." That moment, I always think about, the questions I don't ask black women and certain things.

Yahdon:
But what I will also say that after I'd seen that movie and I started reading a lot of books, I learned personally that black women don't like too many fucking questions, and I learned this when I asked my mother a lot of questions about things and she goes, "What do you ..." I just seen her fists go up, like, "Bro, what's happening right now?" Because I became genuinely curious, and I'm saying that to say to your point, Jumi, about ways in ... Yes, desire and religion are the top line levels of secrets, but I also think that ... and I'm also reading and conversation with everything we're talking about, that All About Love book by Bell Hooks and what she says about lying and the ways that patriarchal culture informs women to lie about the self and construct the self in the eyes and how people will want to see them.

Yahdon:
I think about how much of those desires are also secrets, and I think about the first short story explicitly in this where one of the heartbreaking things about Yula in my understanding of it, on page five, where the narrator says, "Sometimes I wonder if Yula finds fault with these men because secretly she doesn't want any of them and is just doing what's expected of her, but these are all the kinds of things that Yula and I don't talk about," and I thought about these moments where it's like desire too is a secret. Not knowing what somebody really wants in their life and asking, "Yo, what is it that you want?" And it's, "Oh, I just want ..." and that was one of the hardest things with my mother, is getting her to admit what she wanted in her life.

Yahdon:
She said, "I wanted to be a mother," and it's like, "Ma, you saying you didn't is not going to make me feel any way. I really want to know what you wanted in your life," and it was hard for her to admit that what she wanted in life was not necessarily the life she had. I recognize that that's not something that I can control or anything, but I also did recognize in some ways how what's complicated about the way desire plays itself out is that it's not a straight line. Whereas I want something and I go get it, or I want it and I say. It's like I want this thing, but I'm not even sure I want it. I've done all these things to trick myself out of wanting it.

Yahdon:
So when I read that line in Yula, I just thought about the ways in which desire is not as simple and romantic as we talk about it in our cultural discourse. It's whatever you want. There's a level of ... You talk about the prayer. Like in order to some extent, I think, actualize a prayer, I think there's a level of self-awareness you have to have about what it is you really want that exists outside of the institutions that may prevent you from getting it. One of the things that I see that happens throughout these stories is the ways in which ... Even the daughter in When Eddie Levert Comes Home, is the choices she makes to take care of her mother but then the equal frustration of what ... reconciling that it was her decision to take care of her mother and that is what she has to reckon with, with what she wants for her life outside of what she decided with her mother.

Yahdon:
Treating what she decided to do as something she had to do versus something she chose to do and that difficult distinction between how things that can feel like obligation are still in and of themselves choices. I've been thinking just about ... As you were talking, Jumi, again, there's this intersection of secrets and desire. But I'm going to leave it there. Deesha, do you have anything that you can provide for that?

Deesha:
I'm thinking about how much of this is generational. To your point, you talking to your mother who I assume is of a certain generation, and I think about how both my mother and my grandmother have passed away and there's so many questions that I wish that I had asked them, but I knew just sort of instinctually not to ask. You know not to ask. But the tide has turned and in the present moment, I think that there are things, and I'm being really heteronormative now, when men say they don't know, I think more women are more inclined to say, "You don't know because you haven't listened. Not because we haven't told." But the listening. Because I'll go back to my conversation with Damon and he said he felt like he was a fly on the wall of women's conversations and hearing things and learning things about how women think and the things women say and our fears and concerns and all of that.

Deesha:
He was sort of saying it as this is new, these are things he had not heard before. I love Damon, he's a friend of mine, and I said, "Respectfully," I said, "We tell you, but you don't hear us." I'm letting him be a stand in for all men. "You don't hear us, you don't believe us, you don't listen." So I think depending on the generation of woman that you are, I think some of us are more forthcoming and some of us have learned how secrets and silence lives in the body and harms and are trying to not be our mothers and grandmothers in that respect.

Yahdon:
The way your tone hit, it sounded like you had something else to say.

Deesha:
No, sorry. Sorry. That was it.

Yahdon:
Okay. All right. Gerald, S, then Dana.

Alyssa:
Can we both get in on this share?

Gerald:
A two for one deal.

Yahdon:
Yeah. I mean, y'all both in the video.

Alyssa:
Separate things, though. You want to go first?

Gerald:
Yeah. Yeah. For me, I'm returning to Instructions For Married Christian Husbands. Deesha, I just want to uplift your writing across the board, but in particular to building off the point that you had just made, men in particular and listening, this story in particular, I deeply love and respect for the clarity of this story and the character in particular that's narrating this story. Just from the jump, just the writing, just uplift this writing, just the way that it's structured is brilliant, but just on page 146. "The basics, you, the infantalized husbands of accomplished Godly women are especially low-hanging fruit." Just from the jump. Just from the jump, I remember ... Alyssa had read this to me at the beach and I was like, "Damn."

Yahdon:
That was like when Tupac go on Hit 'Em Up and was like, "That's why I had sex with your girl." I was like, "Goddamn."

Gerald:
Goddamn. Let's be clear. For the men in the room, if it wasn't clear already, just start off with the story. This book is not about men. Garnish, that's being generous. Men are just ... Yeah, this is not about men at all. So for the men that are reading this book, just be clear. That was so clear from the jump. But another paragraph on 147, the second paragraph from the top, "Why do you turn me on? Is that you want me when there are so many reasons that you shouldn't. That turns me on. Your hunger, your deprivation turn me on. I don't care why your wife won't fuck you properly. It's satisfaction enough simply knowing she won't. All the risk is yours, but I'll wade out into it with you. I've always enjoyed playing in the deep end."

Gerald:
Now, let me go on because I started that and I was like, "Oh, we going in. We're going in." To build off just ... I'm just highlighting just the things that I had underlined. In the about me section, "Boundaries are crucial." I think just returning it back to the power of clarity, particular with the narrator of this story, which is brilliant. I just love how that was just so succinct and the power of that clarity and the truth telling from that clarity, from that place of clarity.

Gerald:
So I underlined, "Boundaries are crucial," to ... where is it? Another one that I want to highlight though really quick is from the section of your religion. "Don't ask me to repent because I regret nothing. You can't save me because I'm not in peril." Let's be clear about that. In the sex section, page 151, I love the writing here. "I also like lips and tongues and kissing, deep, passionate kisses and biting. I will come if you kiss me right. If you discover my secret place and kiss me there and touch me there just right, I will drown us both." The ocean, the depth of writing here is just beyond. But the metaphor of embodying, particularly the ocean that is like womanhood, but particularly just the ocean and power of black women in particular. I can't uplift you enough. It's phenomenal.

Gerald:
To go on, underlining already what already Alyssa had underlined, in page 153 on the section Foreplay, it's the very last line. "I build monuments to my impulses and desires on the backs of men like you." Let me just say that again. "I build monuments to my impulses and desires on the backs of men like you." Just to be clear. Oh, the other thing too, just really quick, right before Foreplay, the paragraph, and this is like too ... I saw what you were doing here with just the deep ocean of just this story. This is the paragraph before Foreplay. "Your wedding band must remain on my nightstand in view at all times. It is your lifesaver. It will keep you from floating away-"

Gerald:
... you at all times, it is your life saver. It will keep you from floating away into me for more than a few hours. To just embody the ocean of just women everywhere, but black women in particular, it was just like, damn, and the feeling side of things-

Yahdon:
Let me ask you this. What in you is responding to the story because there's so much visceral reaction? What in you was responding to it?

Gerald:
What in me?

Yahdon:
Yeah. In terms of why did it hit so hard for you?

Gerald:
What hit me so hard is, how can you not respect the person that's narrating the story? That's all it is. What's hitting me so hard about it is just this is the writing of the crap, of course, but just the clarity and power. How can you even not respect and love that? That's what's hitting me so hard about this as one starting point of all the other stories because there are many things to be said about other stories, how to love a physicist is another one.

Gerald:
But in particular, what I want to highlight for this conversation is this story because that's, reading as a man in particular, right, what's read, I'm responding from a place of deep respect and love of just the clarity and truth telling from that. And I think that for men reading this, you've got to really be listening into what's in the lines, in between the lines, even beyond that.

Gerald:
And I guess, I'm also responding from it, in my body is I'm getting hot, there are so many examples of all around me, all around us of women just like this, right, that they can get the depth of that. And inviting us as readers to see that all around us, it's not just in the story, that's where I'm coming from, right? And to finish up my thought and I'll hand it off to Alyssa is, I just love Deesha, how you just ended this story, just your departure. You will leave beyond satisfied.

Gerald:
I will treat every time we're together as if it's our last. So many wildcards with men like you I've learned shower or don't gather your things, leave nothing behind, so slide your ring back onto your finger, tread until you are back on dry land. I just love how short and succinct you are with these statements, it just, tread until you are back on dry land.

Gerald:
You can't handle this ocean. You just can't. Go back. And I just, Deesha, but I don't have the words.

Deesha:
Thank you.

Gerald:
I'm going to pass the mic to Alyssa and she could take it away, but deep love and respect for the writing, for what you embody in this story alone and all the stories. Damn, just damn, anyways.

Alyssa:
Deesha, I feel like you were going to respond. You can do that before I go, if you want.

Deesha:
Oh no, I am just so thankful and just really appreciative of the insights and the feelings and this is what every writer wants is for your readers to feel. So thank you.

Alyssa:
I feel like that was a perfect preface actually, because we didn't plan this, but I was also going to speak to that essay, or to that short story rather, but from a really different lens. This is both a personal share and a question for you. In many ways, I feel like this story brought part of me back to life.

Alyssa:
As Gerald mentioned, I read it on the beach and then immediately I was like, put your book down. I have to read this story out loud to you. And then I think I read it again right after that. The personal part, as I'm reading this as a queer woman in a poly relationship with recent experiences that have made me reflect on a lifetime of experiences that at this point are just embroiling me in a lot of anger and disgust for cishet men.

Alyssa:
And I've just been swimming in this anger and disgust feeling for like, I read this story and I was like, oh yeah. I do love men. And I do really love relating to men. And I think what I am actually angry about is the way that heteronormative society has made it such that I've never known how to own the power that I feel in relationship to men and really make those relationships intentional, deeply intentional and boundaried and what I want or need.

Alyssa:
And this was such a beautiful reflection of how to do that from a place of deep clarity that I was just like, there's a part of me that feels like coming back to life through the reading of this. But one of the things I want to ask you about that maybe one of the quotes Gerald read actually kind of answered this, but when I got to the money part where it was very brief and she was just like, do not pay me, I'm not a sex worker, I felt a surprising amount of disappointment because I've been thinking about this story and just life has been...and especially when I read Nadia Lewis's article about that this was Olivia and I learned this was Olivia.

Alyssa:
And I was like, Olivia deserves to be compensated for her power and her brilliance and the ways that she's making men feel pleasure. And I understand that she is also feeling pleasure from these interactions, but why not both, why not feel the pleasure and get compensated? So I'm just curious to hear your perspective on why that was such a clear and succinct section and what your general reflections are on the role of money in these relationships.

Deesha:
And I want to answer it from the perspective of who I think these characters are and I wrote them as I understood them to be. And before I answer directly, I'll use Caroletta and Yula as an example. And one of the things I love talking about with book clubs is whether or not Caroletta would describe herself as gay or lesbian or queer, the words that we perhaps would all use, even though she's more honest about how she feels, more honest than Yula, she's still herself.

Deesha:
She's still a black Southern woman in this particular place and time. And I don't project that onto her. I would describe her, perhaps outside looking in, but ultimately, I believe in people defining themselves for themselves and whatever you would like me to call you, I will call you.

Deesha:
But that's always a good conversation to have because I don't think she would, and as much as we see Yula and Caroletta is sort of, diametrically opposed in some ways I think they have that in common. So answering your question about adult Olivia in instructions, I think it's the same thing.

Deesha:
I think there's still we look at everything she says there, and I think she's the kind of person who does not disparage sex workers, but that's a point of her own respectability, that I wouldn't exchange sex for money. That's part of it. I think the other part for her though, is once somebody pays you, the control and power dynamic changes, and I could imagine that for her, that would be a problem.

Deesha:
So this is my answer on the fly. I've never thought about this before, but that's what is off the top of my head when I hear your question, but I really liked the question. I think it's a really good thing to interrogate for myself as the writer, but for all of us as readers.

Yahdon:
All right. S, then Dana, then Sarah.

S:
Hi, Deesha thank you so much for this book. Can you hear me okay?.

Deesha:
You're fine.

Yahdon:
You're coming in clear over here.

S:
I echo everything that was said about instructions for married Christian husbands. So I'll skip what I had to say about that. I think my favorite story in the whole selection somehow was Jael and I liked the closing quote from judges and the song of Deborah. It reminded me of an experience I had about a decade ago when I was in the church still and reading all of this was really healing for me personally.

S:
So thank you. And thank you all for this experience so far, this is only my second session, and I'm really grateful to be here. I think the memory that this evoked for me was sitting on a really intentionally selected group at church, was probably a 1500 member church. And it was intentionally multicultural, it was intentionally multi-generational and the pastor was, he was trying to be as sensitive and as aware as he could, 10 years ago, as a white man.

S:
And he was trying to highlight the importance of women in the Bible stories that they were teaching. And he proposed a series of stories about these different characters, and Jael was one of them, the namesake of the character here. And he proposed calling the series "sheroes". And there were two of us in the room that visibly didn't resonate with that. There was something about us being from our generation and becoming professionals and working hard to make a life for ourselves that didn't look exactly like what we'd been taught or what our mothers had created for us.

S:
And the two of us, kind of made eye contact and said, "We really think it would be better for you to call it something other than "sheroes", because you're not Maya Angelou." She used this wonderful poem, and I can listen to her wordplay about that all day long from lots of different angles and the identity that she carries and the leadership that she provided, but was like, we really think you could do better from the perspective that you're speaking to, as well-intended, as this might be from where you're sitting and it was not well-received.

S:
And I ultimately wasn't invited back to those sessions, but months later, someone shared the meeting minutes with me and they typically would attribute who said what in the session and so-and-so mentioned this about this, and we should change that about the service. And so-and-so said this and this particular set of comments, there were no attributions, it was literally passive voice.

S:
It was suggested that, this is inappropriate, but I think the series ended up being presented three or four months later with Rosie the Riveter theme. And they renamed it to be unsung heroes. So I guess it was maybe worth mentioning after all. But I think the nuance in the writing, there's so much clarity about the taboos and the secrets and these unspoken experiences and this disconnect between the body and life and emotion and desire.

S:
And it's just incredibly well timed. I happened to be reading Sonya Renee Taylor's book, The Body Is Not An Apology. When you assigned this last month, when you chose this last month Yahdon, but, I don't know, it's an incredible book if anyone is not aware of it or is aware of it, I'd love to hear your comments on that-

Yahdon:
Well, give a brief synopsis.

S:
So Sonya and Nate Taylor, The Body Is Not An Apology. I know she's a poet and has done many other things, but she was also a sexual health educator. And she had a good friend who had a significant disability. I think it was cerebral palsy. And her friend was sharing with her that she didn't feel comfortable asking one of her sexual partners to wear condom because it was already so challenging for her to have a sexual encounter at all.

S:
And so, as a poet, Sonya Renee Taylor, this thought just came to her, the body is not an apology. And so there's a website, I think of the same name. And the book is really powerful and very illuminating. And the cover is very much inspired by Catholic and Orthodox Saint iconography. So I don't know, it's been an incredible pairing. So serendipity, providence, whatever word we decide to use and believe in, I feel grateful. And Thank you. Thank you very much to all of you for what you're sharing here.

Yahdon:
Deesha, you want to say something to that or you ...

Deesha:
No, just we'll give a little aside about Jael. I've read about that Bible story years ago, and I was fascinated by the violence. It's the only example I know of in the Bible of a woman acting violently. And so it really struck me and I kept it and I thought, I don't know what I'm going to do with this, but this means something to me.

Deesha:
And so when I came back to it, one of the things I do when I'm trying to figure out a story is I do what if, what if, what if, what if a girl, a 14 year old black girl had this name, who would give this child that name and what would the implications be? And then Yadon, you mentioned Imitation of Life. My mother's two favorite movies were Imitation of Life and The Bad Seed.

Deesha:
In The Bad Seed, there's a little girl named Rhoda, and she's just murderous. And the belief is that it skips a generation. There's just this gene that makes you bad. And I don't believe that obviously, but it seemed like something that granny would believe about Jael. And so these pieces started to kind of come together. And that's how I got sort of the kernels for what became Jael.

Yahdon:
All right. Thank you. Deesha. Dana, then Sarah, then George.

Dana:
I just wanted to speak on a point you made earlier, someone posed the question about from peach cobbler, the mother, and her passing on her traumas because probably she had some past traumas. And what I appreciate about this book was that so many of these characters were unlearning the traumas of their mothers and learning how to love themselves, whether it was through their bodies, their sexuality, and realizing how their foundation of being in the church was in a sense stifling. There was a passage or a line rather in how to make love, where she is-

Yahdon:
What page you on?

Dana:
Page 104, where the guy and, he was talking about Einstein and he said, Einstein, wasn't an atheist. He said, "He talked about God all the time. Now he didn't believe in a God that was concerned with human behavior, which is the church's obsession and the reason it uses guilt and shame to enforce Christianity."

Dana:
And I think that's very potent to a lot of how we grew up. And I appreciated that he said that to her and she was stuck. And then going on from that, there was that dichotomy of bringing the science and the religions together. And to me, it speaks to now, problems that I have with my girlfriends about our spirituality, because we're all very religious.

Dana:
I mean, all my friends are religious. We all grew up that way, but now we've become very spiritual because we're unlearning that religious upbringing, and unlearning the traumas that we were taught from our mothers and learning to love ourselves in a different way and take that into ... I'm a mother myself. I don't want to give my daughter that same trauma that was given to me.

Yahdon:
Is that it?

Dana:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
Why y'all end so abruptly? You've got to leave this-

Deesha:
Can I respond?

Yahdon:
Of course.

Deesha:
So something Dana, that you mentioned, once I did the whole manuscript and I sent it to the publisher, I thought there's a lot of mother daughter stuff in this collection. That was not intentional.

Dana:
That's what spoke to me the most, not even the sexual nature.

Deesha:
And I think there are two reasons. One which you touched on, which is we learn these things, not exclusively from our mothers, but primarily, and it's in mothers transmit culture, including religion. And so, that's one way that these things, the harmful and the not harmful, all of it gets passed down.

Deesha:
But more personally, my mother passed away when I was 2000 ... I'm sorry. In 2005, my mother passed away. She died of breast cancer. And that was the defining relationship of my life. And it was a very difficult relationship right up until the time that she was diagnosed with cancer.

Deesha:
And she lived four, I think, three or four years after diagnosis. So, for the majority of my life in relationship with her, it was difficult. And when she passed away, we were at peace. We said the things we needed to say, but we obviously didn't get to work through stuff. And I think some of my stuff showed up in these stories. I think that's the other reason that the mother-daughter theme looms so large.

Yahdon:
Sarah then George, then Courtney.

Sarah:
I just want to start with some gratitude and say, thank you. I have not read a full book of fiction. I don't know the last time, partially why I reached out to you Yadon and wanted to join this book club is because I noticed that I was having a hard time reading for pleasure. And so this, I not only finished this book, I finished this book in a day and I think probably I think a lot of people did. But I just, I'm so sweet on this book.

Sarah:
I love the stories in this book so much. And I don't mean to be, I'm not exaggerating when I say, I think I had a physical reaction to every story and so just thank you. And not to move it away from desire, but one of the stories I reacted to the most was "Dear Sister", and definitely pairing that with Jael, because I think for me personally, as a mom and as somebody who kind of has come to some understanding of her family of origin, which I think a lot of these stories are speaking to, there's this sense of, well, how do we work through what we experienced?

Sarah:
And what I loved about "Dear Sister" was there was no apology for the variety of approaches that people took to either being this ... Well, I guess, I don't know if apology is the right word, but I just appreciated all of the different kinds of sisters there were, right? And one sense, sometimes I felt like the sister they were writing to. I have a family very similar to that family.

Sarah:
And other ways I felt like, wow, I really don't know that I've experienced something like this, but I just, I really appreciated the discussion of it because my family is very similar to the way that family was structured. You just learn, who are you telling who you're related to, to who, probably pretty early, right?

Sarah:
So I have siblings that I haven't met. I have siblings that I've just come to know in the last five, 10 years. I have siblings I've grown up with who I don't speak to anymore. So it just that story to me, I felt like really pulled in a really important conversation that I just, I don't ever really get to see reflected.

Sarah:
So I just, I truly appreciate it. And with Jael, I just felt like, I don't know, I felt like, could people see Jael in themselves? I felt like, I don't know. Maybe I could. I don't know. I just really appreciated that story so much. So thank you.

Yahdon:
George, and then Courtney.

George:
So what I love about this Book Club is that there's just so many different perspectives. I'm more literal when I read sometimes. So I think it's great having his group. And it's so funny because my daughter would add so much more value to this Club.

Yahdon:
Don't do that.

George:
She wouldn't enjoy because of me, honestly, because you're like, no, daddy, the way I see the world is vastly different. I say all that to say that I appreciate the perspectives that people have gotten from the book and the perspective that I've got from the book. I always went back to my upbringing, my family, my experiences, because what I like about this fiction is it's so real.

George:
I mean, these are real stories that some of us on this call and this Zoom can relate to. So my sister, who's very religious, and I think, and again, I'm just speaking from my personal experience, I think sometimes black women turn to the church because the ability to connect with a man has its challenges. But then the church has said, well, all you need is God. So they'll have these singles ministries and it's just women.

George:
And so there was one particular time they had a gathering at a restaurant and I'm the only guy there listening to them. And I'm listening to all these women, and one woman that had man, she was more seeing it in a negative light and they're talking and I don't mean to be vulgar, but I'm like, you know what? Y'all need to just find a dude, fuck them, have a good time. And then let it be as opposed to overtaking how the religion aspect has to come into it.

George:
It was mandatory that I grew up in the church. I mean, I had to go and I had no regrets about that because I'm religious to this day, probably in my own kind of way. But my daughter doesn't see religion the same way and I don't want her to, and not that I didn't expose her to it, but she doesn't see it that way. And I'm glad that she can come up with our own view of how she sees the world and see herself in it and not using religion as a crutch.

George:
And so before I close out, I just wanted to ask Deesha one question, I know you spoke about in which I'm glad, about how your mom connected with her and it helped in the stories. And is there any particular story or any particular character that you feel like you can identify with in some aspect?

Deesha:
So, one thing I would like to emphasize is, there's no one character that's me. There's no one character that's my mother. And even though I do have four half sisters, one who we didn't get to know until after our father died, the sisters are not my sisters, even though, as I said in the chat, one of my sisters did wear a "freakum dress" to our father's funeral.

Deesha:
But aside from that, I really wanted to protect everyone's privacy. I did not want my sisters to pick up this book and say, oh wait, she wrote about me. They can say, oh, she wrote about us in our situation, which is having this father who was not a great father. But what that story did is it gave me an opportunity not to necessarily say, this is me and this is how I felt, but I gave those sisters relationships with each other that I didn't have with my sisters.

Deesha:
And so, I always tell people, you might be tempted to take your real life and then just try and fictionalize it. But fiction is so much more interesting, and book drama is way better than real life drama, I think. And so you can take that little kernel of what's real and true, and then expand on it.

Deesha:
And so, there's no me character, but I'm sprinkled throughout this book. My mother is sprinkled throughout this book, all the food in the book, I have eaten that food. That is my backyard that I grew up in, in Snowfall. Those kinds of things are me, but I was very careful not to just basically try and mask biography. I want the challenge of actually telling the story.

Yahdon:
So to your point, and this is a great segue, because I don't know, there's a lot of people, there was a scandal about..and Deesha, I think you know this, about the woman, woman who wrote the cat person story. And it was a short story. So people who don't know, basically what happened was a woman wrote a short story on The New Yorker about this relationship between a younger woman and an older man.

Yahdon:
It came out during the time of "me too", when it was at a fever pitch, that short story, which was fiction went viral. Because the story went viral, that woman got a book deal. Seven figures, got a short story collection done. Short story collection did not sell what a seven figure book deal would engender and sell. The woman used the biographical information of a girl who the man she was dating in real life had been seeing, that woman wrote an essay in slate about a month ago, about her information appearing in the story, which created this discourse around the practices and ethics of fiction.

Yahdon:
There were some fiction writers that were saying, that's not what they do. There were some fiction writers saying that's fiction. But what I noticed was there was a larger group of people saying, what the fuck is going on because they didn't know what fiction was and what that conversation informed me of, both as an editor and as the person who runs a book love for people who are not writers, but people who are reading, so their engagement with books is just I read this book and I'm going back to my life, it's like, I'm not a practitioner. I'm not concerned with the deep artistic questions of what this does. I just want to understand it.

Yahdon:
And something I've learned is that, or something I've learned to pay attention to, is that any time any of us, and this is what I saw fiction writers taking for granted is that there were many fiction writers on Twitter who were dismissing people's misunderstanding about what fiction was. It was largely like, well, if you don't get it, then that's your issue.

Yahdon:
And I'm looking at it like no motherfucker, that's your issue because you're a fiction writer, which means you're going to be misread and meaning when people are reading fiction and are trying to figure out what's autobiographical or real about it, they're reading it as memoir. What I've learned and this is what I'll ask you, Deesha, is the real questions that we come to or should come to in a discourse with fiction and this is not just people who read it, this is people who write about it, even people who are view books review it like it's a memoir, the questions that we all should think when we read fiction, and this is not just this book, but any book of fiction is what parts of this book is imagined?

Yahdon:
Because it's in the imagined part that you see the art come alive. So the question, Deesha I think because, and I know you deal with this all the time is, everybody's trying to figure out which parts of it is real, what I'm going to ask you is what parts were imagined? What parts spring out of your imagination?

Deesha:
I will say this, what's fun is when people send me links to pictures of black physicists and be like, is this him? Because I've said in interviews that How To Make Love to a Physicist was inspired by a real life physicist that I've met, that I had a crush on. And the minute I knew that I had a crush on him, I wrote the first couple of lines of the story.

Deesha:
How do you make love to a physicist, it happens on PI day, dah, dah, dah, dah because I was like ... I didn't know where that story was going to go, but I write everything down as soon as it comes to me, because I won't remember. And then months passed and it was an unrequited crush. I was disappointed. We remained friends. We did not meet at a conference or anything like that. So to your question, I imagine the rest. I imagined, what if.

Yahdon:
Wait, no, but pause for a minute, because this is like when, how can I say this? This is a verzuz and you're Jadakiss right now. No, understand what I'm saying, because there are people who don't understand what that looks like ...

Yahdon:
... are people who don't understand what that looks like, so we could think of-

Deesha:
Okay. I could break it down.

Yahdon:
So give me, just give us a story in which people can see that separation between the fiction. Because if, without this moment, we get a little, like, "People just read it the way it is." We need that, you know that Jay-Z, is it whales, or well? Like you just need ...

Deesha:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
Yeah, just give us one of those moments.

Deesha:
That was it. The rest was imagined, the rest, I put them in a conference, and you all know what transpired. The rest was imagined. However, when I got to the science part, I'm not a science person.

Deesha:
That's when I started to do research, and I started researching different physics phenomena, and I didn't know what I would do with it, but I was, "I trust myself as a writer, just like I have to trust you all as a reader." And I was like, "I'll know it when I see it."

Deesha:
I read about that black hole phenomenon, it glowing brighter, and I was, "I know what I'm going to do with this." So I put that in the story, and tried to understand the science as best as I could.

Deesha:
I also wanted to have that science versus religion conversation, and I drafted a little bit of that. Then I went back to the real physicist, and I talked to him, and I asked him questions about his upbringing, Catholic, and his views on religion. And I also asked him about the science of that black hole phenomenon.

Deesha:
That was the research that went into it. But yes, there was a meeting, and then I built the story from there. That's where the rest of it was imagined, with some research. I don't know, I feel like I didn't answer your question. I can pick another story.

Yahdon:
No, no, no. All right, so here's another way of thinking of it.

Deesha:
Okay.

Yahdon:
When you are imagining, what are you doing?

Deesha:
Oh. Some of the best writing advice I ever got before was to imagine, even when you're not writing a script, if you're writing a story, fiction, not for television or movies, imagine the scene.

Deesha:
Picture the scene as you're writing it, and also employ all of your other senses when you're writing it. Because something a lot of beginning writers, including myself had, was a lot of exposition and back story.

Deesha:
And if you think of it as a movie, whenever you start getting exposition, what happens? The story freezes, and then there's this voiceover, right? And what if a whole movie was just a voiceover? Nobody would want to watch that. So you want to minimize the voiceover.

Deesha:
So instead, you've got to have a scene. So I literally pictured the scene. I see it, I hear it, I smell it, I taste it, I touch it, all of that. That's the imagining part.

Deesha:
Especially dialogue, because I write about people. I may not have known people in these exact circumstances, but I know black women, I know black Southern women. I know Granny, that my grandmother talked like that. So that part ...

Yahdon:
Yeah.

Deesha:
I could just hear it, so I could hear it and I could see it. In that sense, it's like transcribing, that's with the drafts. So I might have these scenes that I draft, and then it's a matter of sequencing in them, and putting them together.

Deesha:
Instructions for Married Christian Husbands? That's less scene-based, and so, that one was, who is this woman? Who is she? Not, is she Olivia, but what kind of woman is this? And it started with that, she has some disdain for these men.

Deesha:
I was imagining her encountering the men, and not writing those scenes, but writing through her eyes, how did she see them? How did she see their wives?

Deesha:
When I knew it was going to be an instruction manual, I'm a Virgo, and so, I was like, "Details." What are all the little components of an instruction manual, so ...

Yahdon:
No. And the reason why I...thank you, because what happens is, I think about just my role in this club, but just getting more people to appreciate the art of literature, which is very different than this, "Oh, I read it."

Yahdon:
It comes out where some people were, "Oh, I read this novel today." "What was that?" "I read Between The World To Me." I'm like, "That's not a novel."

Deesha:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
But in the person's mind, it's interchangeable to them. It's like, it's a workbook, between novels and books.

Deesha:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
The reason why I had you, I asked for you to break that down, was because I really want the people in his book club to appreciate the art of it.

Deesha:
Right, well, then let me ...

Yahdon:
Because, especially-

Deesha:
Let me add one other thing to help with that.

Yahdon:
Yeah.

Deesha:
So I'll zoom out a little wider with Instructions. Instructions started out as 10 to 20 pages of a straight traditional narrative.

Deesha:
Here's this woman, she has serial affairs. She met this guy, this is how she met him and his family. This is the first time he came to her house, right?

Deesha:
So I wrote that, it's probably six months before I finished my book, and I had to finish my manuscript. I needed one more story. And I was, "All right, I'm going to put this one in there."

Deesha:
I read it, and I was bored. I was bored with my own shit, right? It happens. And if I'm bored, you're going to be bored. So I was, "All right, I got to do something, but this ain't it. I don't know what it's going to be."

Deesha:
I'm engaged on social media a lot, and that actually helps me with my writing. Because I talk to people, and I find out, and I learn about really interesting things.

Deesha:
This particular time, there was a meme going around, this particular day, where women who sleep with other women's husbands, somebody made a shirt that was, I Heart Her Husband. I'm in the group chat with a guy friend of mine, and these are the kinds of things we joke about.

Deesha:
We're like, "Why would you ever do that? Isn't there a side chick academy, where you learn, don't make the I Heart Her Husband's shirt?" Then the next day, it was the wives, "But I have his 401k."

Deesha:
I'm thinking, "What's the narrative?" The narrative of infidelity where it's a man cheating is, the women are pitted against each other, and it's almost like the man is incidental. Even our language around the woman, that he's cheating with the side chick, she's literally marginalized.

Deesha:
I was like, "But what if," because remember, I do "what if," what if instead she was not marginalized in this story and this narrative of affairs, she was at the center? What if she made the rules?

Deesha:
Oh damn, what if she made an actual rule book? So then I went back to my pages that I was not in love with, and I took two paragraphs.

Deesha:
And it's the first paragraph, which Gerald read earlier, that was from the original draft. Then there was the paragraph about, which Gerald also read, the ring and the undressing.

Deesha:
I loved those two. I was like, "This could be used in an instruction manual." Then I put in the rest of the pieces, Virgo-style, to complete the manual. So that's how that story was constructed.

Yahdon:
What you just provided once again, is like, it's important that the labor that you and other people as artists bring to the page, especially when it's not memoir and autobiography, which is like, things people can immediately look at and go, "I get this."

Deesha:
Yeah.

Yahdon:
I really want fiction writers and poetry, poets to be appreciated for their art, because when you don't know what the person's doing, it's like, you remember when Vince Carter put his arm in the room, and nobody cheered, because nobody knows what the fuck happened?

Yahdon:
Everybody was just quiet, and they had to keep playing on replay. It was like, "Oh, that's what he did."

Yahdon:
The reason why I asked this question is just to get the people who are reading it, and they're responding viscerally to it, to be able to have that language to go, "Oh, this is some artful shit. I don't know what you did, but it's fire."

Yahdon:
But having you provide what you just provided gives them, "Now I can talk about this shit, and I know why this story fire."

Yahdon:
It gives people, readers, that language that enables them to find confidence, into venturing into other books, possibly. So that was why I asked that. So thank you.

Deesha:
Thank you.

Yahdon:
Kourtney and Jumi, I got you. Kourtney, and then, Jumi.

Kourtney:
I want to give you your flowers Deesha, because this was hilarious. I had so much fun that night. It was salacious enough that it appealed to the nosy bitch in me, because I was sad about people that are extremely outward with their religion.

Kourtney:
Because to me, I've always seen people with, the ones that proclaimed to the loudest to have the closer relationship with God, the further away they seemed to be from the principles of what Jesus was initially teaching, in my opinion. And maybe that's just me being a judgemental Virgo.

Kourtney:
But the story that stood out to me the most was, when "Eddie Levert Comes", because it's like, it hit that part for the mother, to hit that part where she really, she doesn't have her homegirls that were in the world with him, when she was sleeping with her best friend's husband.

Kourtney:
And she does, and dancing around, drunk in her living room with her brown liquor, she doesn't have those homeys, and she doesn't have her church friends. Because once she finished a new membership class, they were like, "Yes, she's not really one of our people."

Kourtney:
Like when you hit that sweet spot of, you're too hood to be holy, but you're too holy to be hood, and it's like, "What do you have, really?"

Kourtney:
But yeah, she reminded me of, I'm not sure if you're familiar, if anyone's already familiar with Transcendent Kingdom, where Gloria is like, she finds that religion fails her. So she wants to become a neurologist, because she couldn't pray away her brother's addiction.

Kourtney:
Now she's dedicated her life to using science as a way to actually find the part of the brain that triggers addiction, so that she can hopefully find a way to fix it. To me, it kind of married the two together, especially when, in my mind, where I'm constantly, I'm really trying to find my way spiritually, but I'm also not really capable of that outward testimonial, that loving God loudly, that everyone just seems to be on.

Kourtney:
I can't really do that, personally, but for me, it's like, my relationship with God is like the way how daughter says her mother's relationship with God is like, that's the love that she has outside of the love that her children have for her, that she is like, "Who has ever loved Mama, besides her children?"

Kourtney:
Mama has never had that peace that passes all understanding that was supposed to be yours, when you invite Jesus in your heart. Nor does she have that joy, that unspeakable outward joy promised in the Scriptures. So it's like when you have the love of Jesus, and daughter imagines that that touches to Ephaniel, and it's.....

Yahdon:
Wait, did you ... I think you're muted. I don't know what's happening. We can't hear you. I can't hear you.

Yahdon:
Kourtney? All right, hold on. Jumi, Kourtney coming back?

Jumi:
I was going to react to Kourtney. I think Kourtney's connection faltered out, because it was flickering, and now it's frozen.

Jumi:
But I was going to say, when I was listening to Kourtney, I was thinking about, that was a really interesting comparison to Transcendent Kingdom. It's like, oh, really,

Yahdon:
Oh, wait. She just jumped on. Hey, what's going on? (Jumi and Kourtney are both talking) Yo, Zoom is tripping.

Yahdon:
Kourtney? Mute.. Yeah, you're ... Why am I yelling? Hold on. I'm going to just type it in there.

Jumi:
She left. She's going to come back, I think.

Yahdon:
Oh, I'm going to type it in.

Jumi:
I think it was literally a delay, but I was reacting to Kourtney's comparison to Transcendent Kingdom about addiction and religion. And I was thinking about it.

Jumi:
I was like, "That's an interesting comparison." Because I think of these books as really different from each other, even though they are circulating around similar questions about connection and intimacy and religion.

Jumi:
I was going to say, I didn't think of this collection as being like Transcendent Kingdom, just because I was thinking about, a lot of people think the opposite of addiction is sobriety, and it's not. The opposite of addiction is connection.

Jumi:
And I think a lot about that in relation to how religion works in this context. I was thinking, also, I wanted to jump in about the art of fiction. Because I was thinking about this, specifically from Instructions for Married Christian Husbands.

Jumi:
One of the ways that this, I think this question is working, impacting people, feeling the authority is, one is, use of second person, but using second person as a mandate to construct identity.

Jumi:
I was thinking of Jamaica Kincaid's Girl, and how that story does the exact same thing. And that's one of the reasons why-

Yahdon:
All right, you got to ... Nope, nope, nope. You got to give us context, for the people that don't ...

Jumi:
... Okay. So Jamaica Kincaid's Girl is a two-page short story.

Yahdon:
Okay.

Jumi:
It's written entirely in second person.

Yahdon:
Okay.

Jumi:
And the second person, which is you, and if we use you, "You opened the door, you walk out the door." So the narrator, therefore, is now being superimposed on the reader, and that experience is being forced on your perspective. That makes you feel like you have to trust it, right?

Jumi:
But then, in Jamaica Kincaid's Girl, she's saying all the things that girls need to do. Instructions for Married Christian Husbands follows that same structure, and it makes readers have to lean in, or they have to close the book.

Yahdon:
Right.

Jumi:
Because it's second person, and it's being done in mandate, right? So I was thinking about the authority of that working, and how readers have to lean in.

Jumi:
The other thing I was thinking about this collection is that one of the reasons I think that so many people like it, they feel connected to it, is because the characters are unlikable. What I mean by that is, that this collection isn't afraid of depicting characters with serious faults and bad behavior, and it not being the focus of the story, or the plot of the story, or what happens to them.

Yahdon:
Yeah.

Jumi:
And that is very authentic.

Yahdon:
Yeah.

Jumi:
Because real life is like that. We have people who we do not like, who do horrible things to us.

Yahdon:
Yes.

Jumi:
But they are not villains, they're just people. So much of Stet's character was that.

Jumi:
And we don't know, did we ever really know what Stet did to each of his daughters? No, because it doesn't, it's not really about what he did that matters.

Yahdon:
Yeah, yeah.

Jumi:
That feels so real. It doesn't have to be resolved. It's not like the villainy of people's actions isn't something that has to be resolved, because in real life, it's not resolved. Parents die, and we don't go to their funerals or don't want to go.

Jumi:
I felt so connected to Tashida for this reason, because I was, "Look, I'm out here saying,"

Jumi:
I forget what page ... Let me find it. The page where Nee mediates, instead of when Kimba's supposed to be mediating, and she's really leaning into the ambiguity among the sisters and saying, "Listen, Rene , I know that you really want Stet to be someone that he isn't. And that's fine with that."

Jumi:
I really felt connected when Tashida's like, "That's cool, if you want him to be what you can't have, and you want to feel like you run shit, but you don't run me, and you don't run all of this." And that's true too.

Jumi:
I mean, Tashida's doing something like, was being antagonistic, but she was also ... Okay. I realize we're running over time, so I'm going to stop. But yeah.

Yahdon:
Just real quick, before we end, Tsahai, I wanted to let you get ... Tsahai, and then, we're going to wrap it up.

Tsahai:
All right, really quickly, to build on what Jumi actually just said. The reason why so many people liked this book is because most, if not all of us, know some of these people, or have had these experiences, as some of these people.

Tsahai:
But what I wanted to say was, because of that, we get that, because this was such an excellent execution of the craft of writing, why we're able to connect, and really dig deep on such a profound level, with each of the stories, each of the characters in the stories.

Tsahai:
And I just wanted to thank you, Deesha, for writing this. I listened to an interview you did ... Oh gosh, it was a podcast, I forget with who, but you were talking about leaving, and that leaving when you're in a personal situation you had, and then being able to finish right ...

Yahdon:
The Lit Hub interview, you're talking about?

Tsahai:
Yes, yeah.

Yahdon:
Yeah.

Tsahai:
It was like a light bulb moment for me, personally, but also let me think about how sometimes we let life put a cap on our greatness, because for me, this book is a good example of your greatness, your writing greatness. And I just had to say that, because you're here, and I wanted to tell you.

Deesha:
Thank you. Oh my gosh. Thank you so much, all of you.

Yahdon:
Yeah, so it was important, Deesha, and anybody, and you didn't get the introduction I wanted, that you deserved, but it was important.

Yahdon:
And I think about writers who do a lot to make sure that their books connect with people who buy. They're trying to find a way through language, and through books, that you, as a writer, gets to feel the love that these literary circuits don't allow us, don't allow you all to feel. So, any time I reach out to writers, I always make it a point to let you all know, this is not a standard Q&A.

Deesha:
Right.

Yahdon:
This is not you selling the book. This is you being able to just feel that love, that you are writing towards, and you know exists on the other side.

Yahdon:
When you don't feel it, you're like, "Damn, what the fuck did I do that for?" You know all these awards, and all those things, that ill, but I know that every writer wants to feel this.

Deesha:
Yes.

Yahdon:
And I just wanted to gift you that, because you gifted to a brilliant collection. So I think that, I hope that you feel full and renewed, by the energy of readers who connect with your work on deep levels.

Yahdon:
That's what I want it to have. I wanted you to have that.

Deesha:
Thank you.

Yahdon:
That's what writers do.

Deesha:
I am so full right now, and just absolutely feel the love. And it was a full circle moment.

Deesha:
The first writing class I ever took, the first story we ever read, Girl, by Jamaica Kincaid. I dropped it in the chat. Thank you.

Yahdon:
Yeah.

Deesha:
Thank you. Thank you, Yahdon.

Yahdon:
And, so ...

Deesha:
You're doing something really special here.

Yahdon:
Thank you. We doing what we're doing, so we're going to continue. We're going to all put our ... What is this, a book?

Yahdon:
Put your book in the, do the thing, please. Can you? You know what I mean.

Deesha:
Can you get my book, please? Sorry.

Yahdon:
And, you know ...

Deesha:
We're doing a picture. Can you reach it? Sorry.

Yahdon:
Nuratu? Just a moment.

Deesha:
I'm getting mine.

Yahdon:
All right, hold on. Hold on, hold on.

Deesha:
Thank you. All right.

Yahdon:
I really can't wait until we back in person, man. Because you would have got the fits, and I know you would have came through with some shit on, Deesha, so I'm really ... Them wonderful patterns.

Yahdon:
Hold on. All right, how do you ...

Eunice:
Oh.

Yahdon:
Does everybody, anybody remember how to ... Oh, okay. Is it Control ... Oh, all right.

Deesha:
Y'all are beautiful.

Yahdon:
One, two, three. One, two, three, cheese.

Deesha:
Cheese.

Yahdon:
Boom. I'm going to send that to you. So thank you, Deesha, for attending.

Deesha:
Thank you, thank you.

Yahdon:
So littest members, definitely ... Wait. Oh, did Eunice definitely? Eunice is definitely on the lit list. She was talking her shit.

Yahdon:
Kourtney, what was the line you said? I forgot the side eye line.

Yahdon:
Jumi, who left, that line about prayer and secrets? Woo, that shit, I felt that.

Yahdon:
I felt that shit in my elbows. I don't get feeling in my elbows, unless I'm leaning on them, playing cards or some shit.

Yahdon:
So, and Dana, whichever, you asking your questions, which I appreciated.

Yahdon:
And who else? Who else? Who else was giving it up crazy?

Yahdon:
Kristin, too. Thank you all for continuing to ... Oh, of course.

Yahdon:
What the fuck am I talking about? My man Gerald, the whole damn audio book, I hear. My bad.

Eunice:
The new book?

Yahdon:
Huh? What new book?

Eunice:
New book?

Yahdon:
I got you. All right. Eunice, what the hell?

Eunice Heard:
Give me a new book. Come on, let's go.

Yahdon:
I got you, I got you. The book for next month, I'm getting it in advance, because it doesn't come out till next week, but a writer we've read before, but she's the writer who talks her shit whenever she gets a chance.

Yahdon:
Next month's book is Having and Being Had, by Eula Biss, a brilliant nonfiction work about the ways in which ... Basically, the book is premised on Eula Biss, who buys a house, and she starts thinking about the ways in which capitalism informs every part of our lives.

Yahdon:
Y'all know that everything, every book I get, what's the word, pick for our club, are not these high concept books that can't be practically applied and thought about and unpacked.

Yahdon:
When I think about capitalism, I don't know why, but I always think about Gerald and Alyssa. Because I know we always have our conversations, and our discourses and our conversations about it.

Yahdon:
I remember, I forgot, what meeting it was, we were talking about it, and I asked, "How do we define capitalism?" It's important to me that all of us, when we're using the words that we use every day, that we have a framework that we can share, in a part with others, so that when they're going into their circles, they're able to share the frameworks that we're coming to the understanding about what things are.

Yahdon:
What's beautiful about this book is that there are little notes about what she's observing in her relationship, into ascending into capitalism. Her buying this house, her having a 401k, I think that what she does is model a responsible way to navigate the system, which is hard for all of us to reconcile. If y'all remember, when we read Braiding Sweetgrass, one of the central conversations was, I understand intellectually that we're supposed to save the planet, all these things, but what do I do?

Yahdon:
I just got this job at Simon & Schuster. Do I quit my job? how do I reconcile this world I want to create with the world I live in now?

Yahdon:
I think this book, Having and Being Had, models how we can be responsible, but how to do capitalism responsibly, but how the responsibility for us to think about the world in which we're creating and what we're doing never changes. And us not being able to change it overnight is not an excuse to not try to change it at all.

Yahdon:
So I think this book is going to be a great model for how we can constantly grapple with the ways in which we want our Heaven now, but how we can create that world for the next generation of people we're leaving this world behind to.