In August 2009, Joyce Carol Oates gave a talk at Cornell University called “The Writer’s (Secret) Life: Woundedness, Rejection, and Inspiration,” in which she discussed her long career, the effects of rejection on a writer’s psyche, and the works of canonical writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Beckett, and the Brontës. As a young writer beginning to make her way in the literary world, the topic of the talk appealed to me almost as much as the fact that Joyce Carol Oates was giving it. By that time, I’d read her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and the essay collection titled after that story, and I understood her stature within the community. Nevertheless, I had been surprised to learn earlier that summer that Oates sometimes wrote under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith.
It happened that I was dog-walking that summer for the writer Tama Janowitz, who had been the 1986-87 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, where Oates teaches, and when Tama saw me reading Oates she gave me a copy of Rosamond Smith’s Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon. The exact plot of that novel escapes me now, but I do remember vividly Oates’s description of surreptitiously reaching out to a publisher with her first Rosamond Smith manuscript, thinking she could sell it under a pseudonym and her agent would be none the wiser, only to receive a call from her agent shortly thereafter to the tune of, “What did you do?” Oates recounted wanting to crawl shamefaced under her desk as her agent informed her that, in fact, she had not pulled off a great deception; that her new publisher knew very well that “Rosamond Smith” was Joyce Carol Oates; and that she had likely been underpaid, because her brand as Joyce Carol Oates was worth more than Rosamond Smith’s.
Like for Oates, this was my first practical lesson in the realities of writing with a pseudonym. My childhood had been littered with evidence that pseudonyms existed and were, particularly for women writers of certain eras, very common. Most of this evidence came via the medium of film (see: Judy Davis as Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin a.k.a. George Sand in Impromptu (1991) and Meryl Streep as Karen Blixen a.k.a. Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa (1985), both films that I saw at a young age, being the sort of child who was allowed to watch anything), but some came directly from my library of books, where initials still abound: J. K. Rowling, A. A. Milne, E. B. White, J. R. R. Tolkien. Not until I attended Oates’s talk did I think of the practical side of being a writer—the signing of contracts, the cashing of checks, the autographing of books. At that time, between my sophomore and junior years of college, a book felt very far off, and it did not occur to me that I might one day need to worry about creating an email account with a pseudonym or inventing an entirely new signature, as I had to when my story collection Night Beast came out last year. I had not yet invented the pseudonym Ruth Joffre in the summer of 2009, but the idea of a pseudonym had already crossed my mind.
As I often tell people when I explain the origin of the name Ruth Joffre, I did not want to publish anything under my father’s last name, so I went with my mother’s maiden name instead. Sonically, Joffre works much better with Ruth (my legal middle name) than my legal first name, and so it made sense to make the change. And yet, virtually every time I’ve had to explain my pseudonym to someone, I’ve been met with confusion, at times even resistance. “Why don’t you just change your legal name? What’s the story behind the pseudonym? So what’s your real name?” Often, their questions take on a suspicious tone: “Well, who are you really? Why are you hiding? How can I trust you now?” It’s as if they’re asking, “Are you someone else in real life?” To that, I say: man, that sounds like a lot of work. Do you really think I have the energy to come up with a whole new persona? I work a full-time day job, teach creative writing classes at night, sometimes do manuscript consults, and have to carve out space for my own work, and you think I have time to pretend to be another version of myself? Fuck that. What you see on social media is me. My personal photos. My dumbass takes on pop culture.
Which brings me to the great unintended benefit I’ve discovered of having a pseudonym: potential employers and colleagues cannot find any evidence of my writing online if they search my legal name on Google. In the hiring process, I do not have to worry about hiring managers or recruiters finding my Twitter. Unless I choose to share my pseudonym with coworkers, that part of my life gets to stay separate. That’s a luxury Joyce Carol Oates didn’t have while submitting her first Rosamond Smith manuscript: privacy. Everything else (all the stress of inventing a new signature, opening a new email account, getting myself paid under the correct name) is worth it when I walk into an interview and don’t have to explain my other career as a writer. There will never stop being people who realize Ruth is a pseudonym and squint at me as if I’m a fake, but I don’t really care. I’m not going to change my name. Next time someone asks me to explain it, I may just send them this blog post.