Why I Write Under Another Name

Peter S. Dubois is a pen name. I use it for four reasons: to protect the real people whose memories went into the books, to keep the books apart from my working life, to let them be judged on their own, and to be free to say what I think, including about how they are made.

None of these reasons is new.

An old practice

In 1846 three sisters in a Yorkshire parsonage published a book of poems as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. After two of them had died, Charlotte explained the choice:

Averse to personal publicity, we veiled our own names under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell; the ambiguous choice being dictated by a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while we did not like to declare ourselves women, because … we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.¹

Ten years later Mary Ann Evans sent her first stories to Blackwood’s Magazine. She was living with George Henry Lewes, who was married to someone else, and she had just published a sharp essay about “silly novels by lady novelists.” She told her publisher she would be “resolute in preserving my incognito,” having “observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.” She became George Eliot.²

David Cornwell wrote his first novels while he worked for British intelligence under diplomatic cover. His employers required him to publish under another name, so he became John le Carré.³

Stephen King became Richard Bachman for a more practical reason: “there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept,” and he wrote more than one. Bachman was found out in 1985. King’s verdict was that “you can change your name but you can’t really disguise your style.”⁴

His son had the opposite problem. Joseph Hillstrom King published as Joe Hill and kept the family connection quiet for about ten years. “I thought it was important for my stories to have a chance to rise or fall on their own merits,” he said.⁵

J. K. Rowling did something similar with a crime novel in 2013. When a newspaper revealed that she was Robert Galbraith, she said being him had been “such a liberating experience,” and that it had been “pure pleasure to get feedback under a different name.”⁶

In September 1991, before her first novel came out, Elena Ferrante wrote to her publisher:

I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t.⁷

She has kept to that. In 2016 a journalist went through property and payment records and published the name of the woman he believed she was. Her publisher called it “disgusting” to go “searching in the wallet of a writer who has just decided not to be ‘public.’”⁸ Ferrante had described what she wanted as the freedom “to remove oneself from all forms of social pressure or obligation.”⁸ She went on writing.

So the reasons have always been mixed: an employer who forbade the real name, a private life to protect, a name that already meant something, or, with Ferrante, the belief that the book should be enough. Mine are mixed too.

The books

There are five books under this name, and they came roughly one a year.

The first was Schabbach, two stories built from what two old people remembered about the war when asked at Christmas: neighbors deported in 1942, and card games with a man convicted at Nuremberg, whom one of them remembered as pleasant company.

My novella What Remained Unsaid is about a man who has lost his parents and a friend, and then his old cat. Looking for her, he goes down into an abandoned slate mine and meets an old Russian who seems to belong to his great-grandfather’s war.

In my novel Sarre, a dying pastor writes to his young son in 1955 about four generations of a family and what faith, nationalism and fear made them do, and fail to do.

My novel Validation is about a night nurse in a care home who has made his life out of being useful and has to learn to be looked after, and about an AI system that management trusts more than the staff. And Cold Solder, the newest, follows the owner of a small factory into intelligence work, partly to save his company and partly because he likes being needed by important people.

Together the books keep coming back to the same questions: what people owe one another, when caution turns into complicity, what a family passes on by not talking, and what happens to a person’s judgment when they want to matter.

None of them is a memoir. But like most fiction, they borrow from real life: from places, from things people have told me, from the way certain families and institutions go quiet when a subject comes up. That borrowing is the first reason for the name.

People who did not ask to be in a book

The people whose memories went into these stories told them to me in private, not to a publisher. Some of them have children and grandchildren. Some of the villages are small enough that everyone knows which house belonged to whom.

The history in the books is public, and I state it as plainly as I can. Neighbors were deported, and some of the people responsible were pleasant company at a card table. What I want to protect is the line from a character back to a particular family. A pen name does not make a book harmless, but it does cut that line.

Work

I have a working life that has nothing to do with books. There are people in it who depend on me and people I depend on, and none of them signed up to be my readers.

Some of the books are set in workplaces. I do not want anyone I work with to wonder whether a character is them, or to read a novel as a coded message about the office. It works the other way around too. What I write about guilt, faith or the past should not become part of how anyone deals with me at work.

Le Carré was given no choice. I have one, and I think the books are better for it.

Judged on their own

I agree with Ferrante and with Joe Hill. A reader should be able to judge these books without knowing anything about the writer’s age, career or reputation.

A name carries a story about its owner. Readers pick it up from the cover before they read a line, and reviewers often write about it instead of the book. Rowling’s crime novel would have been read as Rowling’s crime novel. I have no fame to escape. But I would rather the books start from nothing and earn whatever they get.

Saying what I think

The books take faith seriously, and they take seriously what has been done in its name. They are about guilt that families carry for generations and do not discuss. People hold back on these subjects when everyone can see who is speaking. I would rather write about them without wondering who is reading over my shoulder.

Also, the books are written with the help of AI, and my publisher states that plainly. Many people in the literary world object to that, and I understand why. I would rather argue for it openly under this name than keep quiet about it under my own.

Honesty

Some readers feel that a pen name is a small deception. I understand that, and I think the answer depends on what is attached to the name.

A pen name on its own is a convention readers have known for centuries. Nobody felt cheated by George Eliot’s name once they knew. What deceives people is an invented life, a biography made up because it sells. Laura Albert wrote as JT LeRoy, a young man with an invented past, and sent a stand-in to appear as him. Misha Defonseca’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust as a child turned out to be fantasy, and she was not Jewish. Readers were right to be angry, because the invented life was part of what they were buying.⁹

So Peter S. Dubois has no invented life. There is no author photo of someone else, no story about where he grew up and no credentials. The site says what the books are about and who publishes them, and that is all. A reader learns less about me than usual, but nothing they learn is false.

What the name is not

The name is not a hiding place. Every book under it is mine, and I answer for it. My publisher knows who I am. I will not use this name to say anything about a real person that I would not say under my own.

It does not hide how the books are made either. Each book says so on its copyright page.

And the name will not protect me forever. Bachman lasted eight years. Galbraith lasted three months. King was right that a style gives you away, and I do not expect to be cleverer than they were. If this name is ever connected to the other one, the books will have to stand on their own. That is what I want from them anyway.

So I will end with Ferrante. If the books have something to say, they will find readers. If they do not, a famous name would not save them, and an unknown one will not hurt them.

This note was written with the help of AI. Its arguments, its conclusions and its mistakes are mine.

Charlotte Brontë, “Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell” (1850), in Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, new edition (Smith, Elder, 1850), gutenberg.org. The omitted words are “without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine.’” ↩
George Eliot to William Blackwood, February 4, 1857, George Eliot Archive, ed. Beverley Park Rilett, georgeeliotarchive.org. In the same letter she called the name “a tub to throw to the whale in case of curious inquiries.” The essay is “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” Westminster Review, October 1856. ↩
Jill Lawless, “Master spy writer John le Carré dies at 89,” Associated Press, December 13, 2020, bostonglobe.com: “His first three novels were written while he was a spy, and his employers required him to publish under a pseudonym.” ↩
Stephen King, “Frequently Asked Questions,” stephenking.com. King tells the longer story in “Why I Was Bachman,” the introduction to The Bachman Books (1985). ↩
Joe Hill on On Point, WBUR, March 20, 2007, wbur.org. ↩
Rowling’s statement to The Sunday Times, as reported in “‘Harry Potter’ Author Conjures Pseudonym For Debut Crime Novel,” NPR, July 14, 2013, npr.org. The Cuckoo’s Calling had been published in April. ↩
Elena Ferrante to Sandra Ozzola, September 21, 1991, in Frantumaglia: A Writer’s Journey, trans. Ann Goldstein (Europa Editions, 2016); excerpted by the London Review Bookshop, “Promotion is expensive: Elena Ferrante on anonymity,” August 5, 2015, londonreviewbookshop.co.uk. ↩
Husna Haq, “Unmasking Elena Ferrante: why privacy matters,” The Christian Science Monitor, October 6, 2016, csmonitor.com, quoting her publisher Sandro Ferri and her interview with The Gentlewoman. Claudio Gatti’s article appeared in The New York Review of Books on October 2, 2016, and he himself called his conclusion “not definitive.” I am not repeating the name he published. ↩ ↩²
On LeRoy, “Hoax charges levelled at bestselling writers,” AFP, in Mail & Guardian, January 12, 2006, mg.co.za; Albert later acknowledged the persona. On Defonseca, “Belgian Writer Admits Best-Selling Holocaust Memoir a Hoax,” Associated Press, February 29, 2008, foxnews.com, which quotes the historian Maxime Steinberg: “The De Wael family is not Jewish nor were they registered as Jewish.” ↩