The first time I lied about my writing, the line between truth and dishonesty was a two-letter word. In a text conversation with a friend, I found the fracture between my comfort and her curiosity irreconcilable.
My essay she’d found had been recently republished in the summer issue of a regional magazine—a publication that, despite being known in my community, I assumed was rarely read.
She dropped the bomb in a DM.
“Did you write ‘Legacy Ends Here?’” A text bubble accusation—a violation. I stared down at the screen in disbelief. She’d found, read, chewed, swallowed, and regurgitated something unintended for her eyes.
Shakily, I set down my phone. All I wanted was to deny her question for another moment.
My writing itself is denial. It’s pen names and anonymity in emails to editors, it’s
changing my hometown in author bios. It’s staying in the closet. It’s telling nobody but my notebook about an eating disorder, the page watching me recover. It’s witnessing my life exposed on the computer screen, reserved for anonymous eyes throughout America. It’s assuming nobody in my personal life would ever read my work.
When my friend asked if I wrote that essay, I lied. “No,” I replied, then powered off my phone.
My writing isn’t [redacted]. My writing is Naomi Carr. Of the 33+ Naomi Carrs on
LinkedIn, none of them are my Naomi. It’s the safety in knowing myriad Naomis exist, none of which are my Naomi. It’s the secure seat behind a pen name. It’s the thought that my pen name can hide behind a number of real people who exist. It’s the sound assumption that nobody would ever read my work and draw a line connecting Naomi back to me.
Naomi and I met the first time my work was accepted for publication. Blue Marble’s
editor, Molly Hill, suggested I employ a pseudonym since my piece was so personal. She said it wasn’t uncommon for students to publish their work under pen names. It didn’t have to be a pen name, though. It could be my initials, or initials that weren’t mine—or whatever.
Even with her advice, I found the decision repulsive—hypocritical, even. I couldn’t separate myself from my work, from the experiences and pain on the page. The piece I submitted, like the rest of my writing, was a morsel of my life. It was me. To change the name attached to it would distance me from my work, my writing, and my life. It tasted like a lie, betrayal, sick denial. Would publishing under a pen name make the truth untrue?
Amid my indecision, I texted Zoe—my friend who would find this accepted piece months later in another publication. I told her nothing. She didn’t know the name of my piece, the genre, the content, the publication—nothing. I simply told her my work had been accepted and I didn’t know if I should publish under a pen name. I told her the thought of a pen name felt
superficial, but I considered the editor’s advice heavily.
Zoe told me to be authentic. She told me to own my real name. I didn’t tell her daring to write that piece was owning my real name. I didn’t tell her attaching my “real” name to that piece would put a target on my back, would make me prey to four different people I call predators. She told me to be authentic, but I didn’t tell her that piece—each word handpicked at an ungodly hour—was the most authentic act I’ve ever committed. I didn’t tell her maybe my essay didn’t need my real name to be authentic. Maybe the absence of my real name didn’t make it any less true.
The same month I got my first acceptance, we started reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried in English class. The entire book is a paradoxical parable about storytelling and
war. O’Brien often begins chapters framing what he’s about to say as the truth, only to later claim none of it happened.
By the time we’d read about a third into the book, my teacher posed a pressing question to the class: “Did Rat Kiley actually kill the baby water buffalo? Because O’Brien initially says he does, but he later goes back on his word. So what is the real truth here?”
I’m not entirely sure what she wanted me to say. Nobody else seemed interested in answering her question, so I gave it a shot.
“I think on some level, the technicalities don’t matter. It’s all arbitrary, right? Whether or not Rat mutilated a baby water buffalo out of grief doesn’t make the grief any more or less real. The fact that O’Brien said it—the fact that the sentiment was there—I think that’s enough truth. It seemed true enough for it to be true, even if things didn’t happen that way.”
Whatever my teacher deemed the correct answer definitely wasn’t what I gave her. Confused, my classmates looked at me like I was a mutilated water buffalo—something foreign and nonsensical, something from a different plain of reality.
In hindsight, I should’ve expected Zoe’s answer. She’s a journalist, after all. Founder of our school’s journalism club and School of the New York Times alumna, Zoe finds immense value in the truth—or rather, in the relentless search for it. Investigative journalism is her specialty. In hindsight, I should’ve known the idea of my pen name wouldn’t sit right with her. I should’ve known it would be her, of all people, to connect my writing back to me. It was only a matter of time before she did.
After intense contemplation at my kitchen table, then in my bed, then on my back porch after walking through my neighborhood park to escape the inevitability of my decision, I opened
my laptop again. My reply to Molly was brief—only long enough for me to thank her and ultimately accept her suggestion of using a pen name. Naomi Carr was born.
Naomi is my mother’s middle name. Stowed away between her first and last, the beauty of its Japanese origin always fascinated me. By the time I was twelve, I knew that if I ever had a daughter, I would name her Naomi—in part after my mother, but mostly out of admiration for the name’s sound.
Carr is extracted from the second syllable of my real last name—a familial sound carried across bloodlines from India to Trinidad to Canada before landing in California.
Naomi separates [redacted] from my work, but Naomi is still part of me. She’s my creation, my own. She’s more experimental than any lyric essay or prose poetry or trilingual abecedarian. She lives with my essays and memoirs—in me, between my memory and unwritten words.
Naomi’s name is a patchwork appreciation of those I love. Perhaps she’s an act of self-love—the acknowledgment my work’s vulnerability and my humanity deserve protection. She’s a manifestation that one day, the distance between Naomi and me will be nonexistent.
My writing isn’t journalism, exactly. It’s equal parts essay and memoir. It’s every part truth. The world calls it creative nonfiction.
Creative nonfiction writers bleed their lives onto the screen, strip naked before a blank page, dismember our bodies with our own hands. CNF writers are not always published authors, but we are always entirely human. We are explorers of the self, reverse engineers of emotion. We understand how moths know of loneliness, how masochism and homesickness are the same. We know ourselves through the quiet contemplation of clattering keyboards. We know others through transposing the real world onto the page. We know sometimes the most vulnerable moments are not with others but with pen and paper. We know success is embracing vulnerability, reality, discomfort, pain.
I know CNF is a commitment to myself. My writing is entirely me.
Last week, I told Zoe the truth. On an overcrowded bus ride home from school, she posed her question again after months of living with my lie. It was abrupt but nonchalant, as if a
conversation about college apps easily lent itself to inquiries about my personal writing.
“So, did you? Did you write that piece in the lit mag?” She hesitated in a hushed voice, seeming to feel the gravity of her question this time.
I hesitated. She did not have to specify which piece or which lit mag, but I knew. Smiling in discomfort, I made a futile attempt to evade her question with broken eye contact.
“You don’t have to say, if you don’t want,” she reassured, staring straight at the side of my head while I looked for the answer outside the window.
I took a breath, stared back at her, and found the words to connect my writing back to me. “No, I did. I did write it.” The truth was just simpler than a lie.
OK, I lied. I’ve never lied about my writing—not to Zoe, not to Molly, not to readers, or
whether I am [redacted] or Naomi, whether Zoe becomes an attribution expert, whether every reader knows my real name or none do, it doesn’t matter. I’ve come to see truth not as a spectrum, not as a quality that can be ascribed, intensified or diminished, but as a quiet constant in the back of my mind, a simple through-line on the page. I’ve learned to understand truth is always present, and a pen name can never change that.
This piece may be the final line connecting Naomi back to me. But maybe that line was there the entire time.
