Not long after my novel “Lowboy” was published, in March of 2009, I discovered in my inbox the following note from my conscience:

SUBJECT: identity theft? tax evasion? Dear John P. Henderson— As you can see I’m aware of your *alias*. This e-mail is on behalf of those of us properly born & given the Christian (sic) name W-R-A-Y as our birthright. I am an author as well (The Plenary Storm, Breach of Purpose) who uses the name he was given and proudly. Why Mr. Henderson is that not enough? What have you got to hide? PS I have not read your books. Yrs, John D. Wray

The tone of this email—not to mention the titles of the works mentioned, neither of which turned up when I searched for them online—might have led me to write it off as a joke, if I hadn’t been asked this question many times before. What have I got to hide?

The person doing the asking generally has his or her own considered opinion (affectation, self-loathing, barely sublimated patricidal urges), and I don’t contradict them. I had no rationale when I took my pseudonym in my late twenties, after all, other than a vague sense of my given name as slightly too bland, and a longtime love of superhero comics, in which no self-respecting crime fighter (or villain) would be caught dead without an appropriately spicy nom de guerre. I wasn’t contending against chauvinism, like George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), or against puritanism, like Pauline Réage (Anne Desclos), or political repression, like Mo Yan (Guan Moye); the only thing I was struggling against was my own tendency toward self-defeat. As struggles go, that’s not especially noble, and the answer I usually give, when cornered, is that I took my pen name for no reason at all. This seems to satisfy most people, and, for a long time, I actually believed it myself.

The truth is, I’ve been fascinated by the notion of pseudonyms from the moment I became aware of their existence, which—as near as I can place it—was around the age of nine. My mother, an immigrant to upstate New York from Austria, was in the habit of going through two to three Penguin Classics each week (to improve her English, she claimed, though her English was already perfect), and our house was so full of those elegant orange-spined paperbacks that the color still excites me when I come across it, even if only on an awning or a traffic safety vest. Most of the books themselves were too advanced for me, so I focussed on the Notes About the Author. Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was first; then came Currer, Acton, and Ellis Bell (the Brontë sisters), then Joseph Conrad (Konrad Korzeniowski). There were others before and after and in between, of course, but those writers who seemed to have led double lives thrilled me in a way the others couldn’t, and I read some of those two-paragraph bios (always with a delicately etched portrait in the upper right-hand corner) over and over again, as if they contained encrypted instructions on how to become an adult.

Mark Twain and George Orwell and Isak Dinesen were something more than they would have been without their pseudonyms, or so it seemed to me. Their desire to reconfigure their real, lived experience was so great that it had broken the constraints of their fiction and bled, if only ever so slightly, into the actual world. I wouldn’t have put it this way at age nine, of course; they simply seemed more mysterious to me, and more powerful. They were taking something foisted on them, the identities they’d been assigned, and refashioning them to suit their own designs. They existed as authors and as characters simultaneously. How could that be tolerated?

It often wasn’t, especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Many books were published anonymously or under noms de plume in that first great age of the novel, and determined sport was made of exposing the persons behind them, often based on the supposed “maleness” or “femininity” of style or point of view. Some authors accepted exposure good-naturedly, as the inevitable price of success; some emphatically did not. “To you I am neither man nor woman,” Charlotte Brontë wrote in an angry address to her critics, after the true identity of Currer Bell became known. “I come before you as an Author only—it is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me—the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.’”

Much as I might agree, my own case strikes me as having more in common with that of Toby Forward, the Anglican vicar who, in the nineteen-eighties, wrote a series of stories posing as a teenage girl by the name of Rahila Khan. Defending his motives in the scandal that eventually resulted—his stories had been published in a series specifically intended as a platform for young immigrant voices in Thatcher-era England—Forward insisted that the Khan stories had not been meant as a hoax, declaring that his pseudonym “released me from the obligation of being what I seem to be so that I can write as I really am.” I differ from the good vicar on a few minor points (I don’t think anyone writes as they “really are,” for example, since all style is either learned or invented), but I agree about the “release from obligation.” That’s as close as I can come to my own reason for having chosen to write as John Wray, and for continuing to do so, in spite of the obvious drawbacks. I’ve discovered that working under a name other than the one in my passport—while an undeniable hassle in airports, hotels, and banks—is a marvelous way to dodge my inhibitions. It doesn’t say much for human psychology, I suppose, that such a simple-headed trick should work so well, but I’m in no position to be fussy. Writing is hard enough without the sin of pride.

From a certain angle, there’s almost no difference between a piece of fiction and a dramatic monologue, or even a stand-up comedy routine. The wonder of revision, I’ve always thought, is that it enables the writer—any writer, regardless of experience or skill—to run through a given routine again and again, until it suddenly becomes worth listening to. And the advantage of a pen name—in my case, at least—is that it gives said writer the courage to perform for his imaginary audience, no matter how charmless or pretentious he might feel. John Wray isn’t so different from poor, nebbishy John P. Henderson from Buffalo, New York. He’s just slightly better company—at least when the work is going well. When it isn’t, needless to say, he’s insufferable; but that’s when I remind myself, with a physical rush of relief, that John Wray doesn’t actually exist.

Which brings me back to the author of “The Plenary Storm,” wherever he may be (catchy title, by the way). I haven’t answered your e-mail, but I’m hoping I’ve answered your question. It’s exactly because John Wray isn’t the name I was given—because it’s one I’ve chosen more or less at random—that I find it so helpful. I’d recommend a pseudonym to everyone, if only temporarily, as a kind of exercise in self-escape. Last I checked, John Henderson was up for grabs.

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John Wray’s fourth novel, “The Lost Time Accidents,” will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2015.

Illustration by Wesley Allsbrook.