Pseudonym or deception?

When does blurring the truth become fiction?

Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash

I write under my own name, and for the last ten years or so I’ve had my photo online too. If you ran across me in the supermarket and thought I looked vaguely familiar, a glance at my credit card at the till would confirm who I was if you hadn’t already heard my other half addressing me.

When I first started blogging I didn’t like the idea of having my real name or identifiable details out there¹ and I was simply Thousandmonkeys, somewhere in West Yorkshire. My profile picture was the photo of my hand holding a pen, which I think still lurks somewhere around here. Then I started publishing short stories and flash as JY Saville and I was eager to point people in their direction, and eventually some editor used Jacqueline instead of JY by accident and there was no point obfuscating any longer. Anyone who knows me in real life can find my witterings and fiction online and know they’re by me.

An elderly relative of mine — inspired by me, so she said — briefly wrote fiction online about ten years ago. They were lurid tales loosely based on her working life in the 1970s, and she wisely used a pen name for them. On her blog she told no more than the usual lies and referred to her pets by their names, but as far as I know she never revealed her own or her children’s names, in much the same way that I refer to The Nephew, Sisters Number One and Two, Big Brother and Friend T.

Even though I now happily use my name and photo and tell you all sorts of stuff, you’re not (luckily for you²) getting the full unvarnished truth: everyone has personas. I probably wouldn’t declare during the chitchat at the start of a work meeting that I bloody love Hullraisers³ but I’m happy to do so here. When my dad had a market stall he had a hat for every season, and much like Terry Pratchett, when the hat went on he became his public self. My dad’s public persona was several orders of magnitude louder, pushier and chattier than the version that left home in the morning. None of these things are what I have in mind when I mention deception. So what am I on about?

For some reason JK Rowling’s Robert Galbraith books came to mind this week. I haven’t read any, but I vaguely recall that not only did she use a pseudonym but she made up a backstory for Mr Galbraith, who had supposedly been in the army and was doing something clandestine at the time of writing. If I’d been influenced in my purchase of the first novel by the ‘fact’ that it was the debut by an ex-soldier, or that it was going to be written with an insider’s knowledge giving flavour to the ex-military main character, I’d have been a bit cheesed off by the eventual authorship reveal. I can understand the desire to write under a pseudonym when you want to change genre, and Galbraith’s supposed current employment meant she could dodge the need for an author photo or a book tour, but still the whole thing makes me a little uneasy.

Similarly, a male writer of my acquaintance published a novel some years ago under a female pseudonym because he wanted to write a first-person female character and didn’t think it would be as readily accepted under his own name. He got round the book tour/signings/interview problem by declaring it to be a posthumous publication. Up to this point, it doesn’t really bother me, though anyone intentionally reading only women writers that year would have been annoyed by the truth. It was the extra touches to the woman’s backstory — born in another country but with some connection to the town he lived in, the book written in an earlier decade in her second language — that seemed to make it worse. I don’t really care about the gender of an author, but tell me they’re from somewhere I have a connection to and I’m on their cheerleading team⁴.

On the flip side, I know a writer who used real people’s experiences to make a serious point⁵. I applaud his intention, and I understand the need to stop vulnerable people from being identified from something presented as a true story — ‘some names have been changed’, etc. But as I understand it, he blended some of the people together. Possibly this is standard practice in the sort of non-fiction writing that uses case studies, and is the only reasonable way of avoiding identification. Nevertheless it’s bothered me since I found out.

Good grief, a reader will think, the poor woman was suffering from that AND experienced this AND in those circumstances. How awful. But did she? Or is she made of three different women, and if so, does that change how we feel about her plight? Does it change the insights we thought we were getting into a hidden world? The writer in question also publishes fiction, so why not write a novel or collection of short stories closely based on the case studies? If the answer is ‘so people can’t dismiss them as never happening in the real world’ then my first thought is — but they didn’t, or not like that. Haven’t they become as fictional as the fictional version would be?

I am a legendary over-thinker, as some of you will know. Do any of you have thoughts on the boundary between a slight blurring of the facts, and wholesale invention? Does it matter to you as a reader if the author’s background and experience turns out to be false, or the supposedly true and accurate tale merges some events or characters together? Have you bought a book because the author had the same job as you or came from the same town? Feel free to let me know.

1. This shows how old I am, I guess. I not only have a landline but it’s ex-directory; the necessity for a phone number on every online form irks me.

2. Just ask Friend T, who’s put up with my nonsense for 35 years

3. It’s a Yorkshire-set sitcom about sisters. Of course I love it.

4. Not literally of course. I’m British, middle-aged and have an aversion to pom-poms unless they’re on the crown of a hat.

5. I am being deliberately vague because I like him and I’m not entirely sure how I feel about his ‘deception’ so I don’t want to identify it. There is probably a useful lesson to be learnt about today’s topic there…