Who is Josephine Henneberry?

I have chosen the pseudonym Josephine Henneberry for several reasons. I chose to blog under a pseudonym rather than my own name (of which I’m really quite fond) because someday I might want to apply for a different job (and in the meantime, I’d like to keep the one I have), and there might be something in this blog that would offend the delicate sense of propriety of potential employers who Google potential employees. I chose this specific name because Josephine was my favorite name as a child. I thought it was the most beautiful name in the world and that anyone blessed with this name must surely be beautiful, kind, loving and loved, and lead a truly wondrous life. In starting a blog, I’d like to reconnect with that blond-haired, blue-eyed girl (I’m now sandy-haired and only occasionally blue-eyed, tending more toward gray the rest of the time) who spent hours dressing up in her finest “famous author” clothes and attending famous author banquets in her bedroom. I also like the connection to Jo in Little Women. Henneberry was my grandmother’s maiden name and I have always been fond of it. I like to think that assuming this name will bestow me with something of the twinkle in the eye of my great-grandmother Nanny Henneberry.

This is not to say that I will not reveal myself to the hordes of faithful readers I will no doubt attract. I’ll probably even post photos (or at least links to photos) of myself in all of my real-self, sandy-haired unglory. My concern is really just with ensuring that this doesn’t pop up when my name is searched.

The more I think about it, the more intrigued I am by the prospect of a pseudonym. They’re really quite romantic, aren’t they? Whenever I think of pseudonyms I think of dashing, bold 18th or 19th century writers who couldn’t use their real names for fear of being discovered as a miscreant or a Catholic or heavens! a woman. I think of danger and intrigue, dark nights, secrets and lies (the good kind that make for great fiction), a secret Loyalist riding his horse through the night, his funny 18th century jacket flapping behind him, to escape persecution, or a brilliant woman in a big-butt dress feigning appropriate ignorance while her husband raves in the coffee shop to his friends about the incredible book he’s reading, written in secret by the light of a single candle each night while he slept.

Do you reckon I over-romanticize much?

I feel a great sense of freedom in assuming this new identity, as if attaching someone else’s name to my life will allow me to more fully express the events and emotions of my life. I have thought a lot lately about our lack of privacy in today’s world. I was startled to discover a few months ago that a Google search of my name brought up a quote in my college newspaper from October of 2001 in which I said I think “Bush is doing a good job.” I was horrified. Of course I remember the moment clearly. I was in the campus coffee shop in between classes and a nosy student reporter wanted my views on the September 11th attacks and the potential for war. It was less than a month after the attacks; I was 19 years old; what did I know? Now I’m stuck with that association forever? I realize that I’d be stuck with it before the Internet, too, but who reads dusty archives of college newspapers? My only hope is that later associations with my name on a pro-impeachment website will make it clear to the searcher that I moved on from such ignorance. But what if they don’t get that far? What if they don’t look at the whole picture, or look at the date of that quote? We don’t get to provide the context or the justification for these snippets of our lives. They’re just out there for anyone to make of them what they will without our explanations, or, indeed, our knowledge.

Another thing that came up was a poem I wrote when I was 17, which had been outright stolen (despite a copyright notice) from my dad’s website and posted on a terrible, horrible, poorly designed, and utterly pointless website, with the encouragement to use my poem (entitled “Secret Admirer”) for the readers’ own secret admiring ambitions! After a nasty email from me it was promptly removed, but it really drove home the futility of keeping anything private. Sure, I’m okay with having my teenaged poetry appear on my dad’s website because there it’s in the right context. But on a trashy love site? It’s not just my poetry they were stealing; it was my name, my identity, my sense of personhood.

I thought about the changes the Internet makes to our identity last year when my boss had his first baby. He had created a website for her before she was born. It’s eminently sensible and something I’m sure many proud new parents do. It allows friends and family to keep track of Baby’s growth and development without Mom and Dad having to repeat the same conversations over and over. And the pictures! What joy! Still, I was a little uneasy about the idea of this tiny creature having a website in her name splashed to the world before she was even born. There just seems to be something a little theft-like about that, a little infringing. She’s a person, after all, helpless as she is. Shouldn’t she get to decide which parts of her life get broadcast and which ones don’t? Here we are, forming a perception of her identity before she even has a chance to work out her identity. There seems to be something gravely unfair about that.

This sense of a loss of privacy is creeping into my personal life. Everyone keeps certain aspects of their lives private from certain people in their lives. Maybe you don’t tell your parents that you smoke (tip: they probably know anyway). Maybe you don’t tell your in-laws that you and your husband met when you were working at Hooters. Maybe you don’t tell your boss that you spend your weekends as a political activist on the opposite side of the political spectrum from his or her views. It’s normal and natural and healthy to keep some things private from some people. But now, it seems everyone I know is getting a Facebook account. I have had a Facebook account since the days when it was still thefacebook and it was open only to people with a college email address. It seemed harmless enough at the time, and I certainly didn’t expect to still be actively using it (indeed, using it even more frequently than I did then) three years out of college. And it has been a great way to keep in touch with people I wouldn’t otherwise keep in touch with. But I was always free to post anything I wanted to, keep anything I wanted to in my profile because I knew the only people who would see that information would be my immediate peers. Now, family members (OLD family members! and my husband’s OLD family members!) are joining and want to be friends with me. And that’s fine. I like them. They’re good people. But I don’t really need my Catholic family members to know the details of my cynical view of religion. I don’t really need my husband’s conservative Republican family members to know about my pro-impeachment activism. I don’t really need my co-workers to know that I took the day off to lounge around the house all day because I didn’t feel like going to work.

Sometimes, I wonder if we’ll all stop hiding those parts of our personality that we used to keep secret from some people. And if we do, will it improve relationships? Have we all been hiding ourselves unnecessarily? Are our friends, family, and co-workers really more accepting than we think they are (especially if they know we know all about them, too?)? Or will we find that, as we feared, we will be baited into political, religious, musical, and literary discussions with people whose views are fundamentally opposed to ours, creating rifts in our relationships that need not be there if everyone were just permitted to keep a few things to themselves?