The Art of Naming in Memoir Writing

Fuel from Mary Carns and Halftank Studio

What would you call a boss who takes calls from his realtor during Zoom calls, without muting himself, during pandemic-era Zoom calls when everyone is terrified of getting fired or worse? I could use a lot of curse words to describe him, but to describe him to people I now call him Mr. Beach House.

Thinking about, then writing, a memoir meant that I carried around a cast of characters for years: the people, the companies, the situations. And when I could not use real names — which, in a book about fifteen years of workplace dysfunction, is basically everyone — I ended up needing a naming system. A pseudonym isn't just a legal workaround. Done right, it's a compressed editorial judgment. Every name I chose for Bad Fit had to do double duty: protect the actual person while telling you something true about who they were.

Some names came easily. The executive who bragged about shopping for a beach house while his team panicked about layoffs basically named himself. The financial company's innovation lab, where the leader showed up every Friday at 4:30 to contradict whatever he'd told you the week before, then disappeared to give a speech at a conference? That guy I called Dean. He made his living talking. He talked constantly. He talked about revolution. His team's official name for their Agile processes was "Ways of Working" — because Dean liked the acronym WOW. He was a man who wanted everything to sound like a headline.

I had some experience in naming characters: when I created personas for companies — if you are unfamiliar, they are characters that companies create internally to represent their customers when discussing things like potential upgrades.

Many characters merit actual names. Those characters display multiple patterns of behavior that can only be unified by using an actual name. Other characters I felt needed to be defined by the one action that I will always remember them by. In a couple of those cases, those actions were so extraordinarily egregious that I honestly cannot remember what their real names are.

The company names that I needed to change in my memoir were a different kind of problem. I went with Italian. Rifiuti. Immondizia. Both mean garbage, more or less — which tells you something about how I felt about those places by the time I was done with them. But I also needed the names to be opaque enough that I wasn't just broadcasting my contempt on the first page. Italian garbage sounds almost elegant if you don't know what it means.

I’ve been low key learning Italian for years now. One thing I really love about the language is how certain words can, by uttering them, fully express what they mean by the sound alone. One of those words is “spazzatura”, or trash. I can just imagine “spazzatura” being spoken while simultaneously spitting on the ground. So I looked for synonyms for those company names.

The harder naming decisions were the ones where I actually respected the person, or at least understood them. A nickname for someone who did you wrong is easy — the contempt does the work. A nickname for someone who was a bystander, or who helped me on the downlow, or who was themselves a victim of the same dysfunction? That took more care. The name has to be neutral enough to protect them without flattening them into one dimension. Those characters don’t just have behaviors, a couple of them also have story arcs. For them, I took the same tactic as I do when I name plants and animals: what name did they look like to me? Sometimes it took me a couple of tries as I wrote drafts.

My memoir has been in professional editing for a while now, and one of the things the process taught me is that the naming choices readers never question are usually the ones that took the longest to get right. The name that feels inevitable took three other names to get there first. One name, one character, can mean so much in a story, even in a memoir first where the story is true.

If you've ever had a boss or co-worker you couldn't talk about in polite company, you've probably already given them a character name too. Those names probably match perfectly with the stories that you tell about them.

What's the nickname you've been using in your head for years that you've never said out loud to anyone outside your inner circle? Hit reply and tell me one name — real, invented, or somewhere in between. I read every one.

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