I Didn’t Realize How Wrong My Name Felt Until I Changed It

In May 2021, I hit the high point of my young writing career: I published my debut novel, The Atmospherians. But there were two problems. The first was that I published it under the wrong name. The second was that I didn’t even realize I’d done this.

The name on my book cover wasn’t technically wrong. It was my name: Alex McElroy. The name I’d been using all of my life. I’d scribbled it in the upper-left corners of envelopes and bubbled it into Scantron tests. I’d rubber-stamped it on priceless possessions before moving across the country. During particularly rough stretches of writing my novel — which took about five years to write; there were plenty of rough stretches — I would fantasize about seeing “Alex McElroy” glitzed across the front cover, the book squeezed on shelves between Cormac McCarthy and Ian McEwan.

But shortly after the novel was published, the very thing I’d been hoping for became a source of anxiety. There was something off about seeing the name Alex on the cover. At the time, I couldn’t articulate why it felt so weird. But every time I held up a copy or shared a review or an interview, I would feel a splinter of shame.

There’s a full trailer for May December. ​Hard to imagine there are actually people out there willing to pay $499/month for Tinder. No-fault divorce has improved the lives of millions. Now, some extreme Republicans want to abandon it. Surprising no one at all, a new Deloitte report shows that women have higher out-of-pocket expenses for their health care than men at every age. In other “No, you’re not imagining it, you’re getting screwed” news, shrinkflation is the new normal. And Taylor Swift is single-handedly boosting the U.S. economy.

Sign up to get Brooding, a biweekly newsletter interrogating modern family life, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton.