Pseudonyms, Personas, and Secrets Getting Out
As most writers do, I have a day job. As most people do, I have a day job that is not aligned with my passions. “Make money during the day, pursue your interests at night” was my mother’s advice, and I’ve always followed it. This means that opera, erotica, painting, and feminist reading are strictly night-time pursuits.
I work in a male-dominated field, and my company is especially testosterone-heavy. On every project, in every meeting, at every business lunch, I am the only woman at the table. The disadvantages of this position are well-documented in feminist literature, but it has its advantages too. The main advantage is that everyone knows and remembers who I am.
For obvious reasons, I haven’t told my colleagues at work much about my writing. I told some of them that I write as a hobby, but if they asked for specifics about the subject matter I would always demur. Maddy Stuart is not my real name, mostly in the interest of keeping my google results clean.
My secret has never been airtight, however. Before I started working with my current employer, my boyfriend Peter (not his real name, of course) was working at a different company with the man who is now my boss. When my first stories were published, Peter was so proud of me that he told many of his friends about my writing, including the people I would later be working with (although there was no way of knowing that at the time). So right from the beginning, there was someone else at the conference table who knew about my two names.
Gossip gets around, even among people who consider themselves the height of professionalism and discretion. I am certainly no exception to this; I know exactly how it goes. Two people, colleagues and friends, are chatting after a drink or two when one says to the other, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but…”
Several months ago my boss told someone who told someone else. Tonight that someone else, an important person at the company, said these two words to me: lesbian erotica, and then asked me to confirm what he’d been told. I told him the truth, but didn’t give him my pen name.
In How To Write a Dirty Story, Susie Bright writes that in her experience, rather than being outed by someone malicious or inquisitive, erotica writers tend to out themselves. And I did out myself, in tidbits. I was so proud of my writing that it was difficult not to tell people about it, and I told many friends who could have related it back to my colleagues. I read in public at In The Flesh, and I kept copies of my work in the apartment I shared with two co-workers. In retrospect, someone willing to do a little digging would have been able to discover my secret quite easily. So I shouldn’t be surprised that someone dug and discovered, as comforting as it is to blame my boyfriend and my boss, who told.
One of my internet heroes is career advice blogger Penelope Trunk. I find her writing both inspiring and sensible and when I read her columns, I apply her advice in my head to both my “real” technology career and my largely hypothetical writing career. Discovering the sexually explicit fiction she wrote under the pen name Adrienne Eisen only made me love her more. But in her vast blog archives I could never find a satisfactory answer to the question of where to put my “other personality” while on the job. She writes that one should bring one’s authentic self to the workplace and abandon anonymity, but admits that she has used many pseudonyms herself, and tells how her employer balked at having her fiction associated with her name. And the works of Adrienne Eisen give plenty of ammunition to Penelope Trunk’s detractors — every time I see someone on the internet vilify her as an air-headed slut or porn-peddler, I shiver and think that could be me.
Then there’s the issue of Maddy Stuart, who is herself a very dim representation of “the real me”. Sexuality for me is grandiose and profound and full of beauty and shadow and drama. Sex, the way it exists in my head, lives in opera and silent movies and humming city streets and hungry, heavy-lidded looks. And of course real life, with its messes and drabness, seldom measures up to the fantasy. My real-life experiences of sex are mostly ordinary rather than adventurous, and I’ve found it difficult to fill in a person around the name Maddy Stuart because I sense that as I exist, I do not fit the mold of what an erotica author should be. So my fiction is full of mysterious fantasy women who appear and disappear, and I struggle to find a tone for my blog that both reflects my interests and conceals the fact that I’m an impostor, unfit for this circle of beautiful perverts.
My father recommended a different book to me today that gives advice very unlike Penelope Trunk’s. It is called What Men Don’t Tell Women About Business, and its advice is as follows: Don’t discuss your personal life at work, don’t try to be nice, and don’t ever show vulnerability, because others are waiting for you to fail. And though I find the picture he paints to be bleak, I can appreciate what he means when he tells his readers to always keep others’ secrets.
Interview in the Toronto Star
I was interviewed by the Toronto Star early in the year, and the article appeared in print yesterday (catching me a bit by surprise).
Hello to all of you who visited! Since then there have been a number of significant changes in my life, and I hope to be turning to this website again soon. In the meantime, there’s cover art for the anthology Second Skin: Erotic Stories about Leather and Latex (in which my story, Opera Gloves, will appear).