James Baldwin famously claimed that “every writer has only one story to tell,” and I’ve found that to be true. In my work I find myself grappling with the same set of ideas in different settings, changing scenery and characters to illuminate the same set of human truths.
But if each writer has one story that we keep on perfecting, what does that mean for those of us who publish under multiple names? If the name changes, presumably so the does the story … or does it?
This month I’m publishing my fourth book, but it’s also my debut. It’s vastly different from my previous three novels, but in several key ways, it is exactly the same.
I started writing Honeymoon Stage much the same way I’d started the earlier novels — I had an idea, and I settled on a narrative voice. I was about 75 pages in when my agent suggested this book might be better published under a pen name.
I initially dismissed the idea. Surely, I was still writing my same story, a story about women and societal expectations. I’d jumped ahead several hundred years, and leapt across continents, but the questions I was grappling with through fiction were the same: what does it mean to embrace a circumscribed role, and can doing so ever lead to actual power and personal success?
In the last book, I had a wealthy noblewoman battling a sea monster. In this new one, a reality TV production assistant battling her celebrity stars.
My agent wisely pointed out that not everyone who loves reading about Baroque Venetian sea monsters appreciates a novel inspired by MTV’s first forays into reality programming, and vice versa.
And more than that, the craft required to do each subject justice was necessarily different. One book called for luscious, atmospheric prose, the other for more straightforward language. One book embraced the tragedy of its premise, while the other wanted a happier ending.
In order to write the MTV book, I needed to be a different kind of writer than I’d been with my earlier three novels. Thus, Margaux Eliot was born, a pen name for this new kind of book.
The draft I’d first shared with my agent and editor was a hybrid, but once I declared Honeymoon Stage a Margaux book, certain editorial choices became clear. I could have that happy ending. I could lean into the jokes, make the book pacier.
It was easier to know what to cut and what to keep, how to streamline the myriad decisions of revision. Things that felt anathema to a Julia Fine novel were perfectly easy under the umbrella of Margaux Eliot, and while the book was still as much my same story as ever, the trappings had totally changed.
Some people write under a pen name to maintain anonymity: a public figure that doesn’t want to be seen as a writer of steamy romance, or an artist who values their privacy. Others use nom de plumes as signifiers of what kind of book they’re writing, the name on the cover letting readers know what they are in for.
I’ve never kept the fact that I’m writing under Margaux Eliot a secret. I’m less interested in hiding my identity than announcing that, with this new book, I’m going in a different direction.
In a way, having both names feels like driving on the highway. I can change from my commercial lane into the speculative literary lane whenever I need to, but I’m always going to be in the same car. Like James Baldwin, I’m still telling my same story, only now I’ve got new ways of honing in on that truth.
