My older sister read my script over the weekend and noted that she didn’t like one of the character’s names. When I asked her why, she shrugged, “I don’t know.” It was meant to be a funny name, or comic name. It rhymed with looney. It clearly wasn’t working. How is it that sometimes a name seems just right, perfect, beyond question? Other times, they ring wrong. Sometimes it seems as if the right name can set the stage, open doors, lead the charge. King Lear. Jo March. Augie March. Boo Radley. Newland Archer. Dick Diver. Nathan Zuckerman. Hanibal Lecter. Herbert Pocket. Victor Frankenstein. Elizabeth Bennett. Esther Greenwood. Daisy Buchanan. The World According to Garp. Garp? What makes a name memorable? Is your name your destiny? Scout. Pip. Jude the Obscure. Where do you find your names? What’s in a name? I think, for me, Charles Dickens is the author to beat for great names.

Yesterday, I was in a museum and I saw a portrait of a society lady by John Singer Sargent and I thought the name of the woman would be a terrific character: Louise Inches. What are some of your favorite character names, or if you’re really brave, fly one of your own up the flagpole and see if it waves.

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My husband has been reading the Saul Bellow letters. Over the last few days, he read out parts to me. I am a huge Bellow fan and plan to read the letters myself. Part of me wants to tell him to stop, don’t ruin it for me. But I don’t. I love hearing the riffs and moments that catch John’s eye. I think the theme is the same: space. How much you allow yourself as a writer.

I saw an exhibit over the weekend by a young artist called Mark Bradford. I felt an immediate kinship with paintings. As I made my way through the exhibit, I learned that his mother had a beauty salon and he learned much there about making hair beautiful and the slow processes involved. Many of his works are collages that employ permanent paper from the salon. People try to call his work collage. He says they are paintings without using paint. He also talked about space and growing into larger canvases, about being nervous at first to take up too much space. At the end of the exhibit, his paintings took up entire walls and could barely contain their energy, the power of the idea, the painstaking execution.

How much space do you take up, your work?

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The responses to today’s post (and thank you editor lurkers for coming out from behind the veil), made me think about my idea of what the writing life was like at 20. I was spending my junior year abroad in London, aka running away from the life I failed to achieve at NYU. My dorm room was in Tooting bec, in the south of London, extremely isolated and unfashionable at the time.

A group of girls had gone in together on a flat near the Chelsea Road; they invited me to join but I craved that solitary room. I kept it very spare except for a poster of the Arbus twins.

That year I had two independent studies and I did them on Philip Larkin and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I read everything they wrote and still love them dearly. Most nights, you could find me drinking bad red wine, eating peanuts out of a cellophane tube, and reading Hardy novels. When I wasn’t in school, I was riding the top of the double decker buses, smoking, and writing in my diary. I made one friend and he no longer speaks to me.

Writing meant everything to me, but I never imagined being a writer, or being published. We didn’t know any writers, those kinds of dreams seemed like they were for other people. I always felt very humble when I read a book. If it was slow or boring or difficult to follow, I always believed the fault was my own. If it was in print, I believed it to have sacred qualities. What I did, all the scribbling in my diary, all the poem fragments, didn’t exist on the same continuum as published works.

My one friend and I used to go to a place that had an open mike poetry reading. We were astonished to discover that in the UK, people were happy to heckle and insult the readers. We went week after week and squealed with delight at the public humiliations thrust upon the poets. It was blood sport. Needless to say, I never got up and read a poem. At twenty, dear readers, I was an amoeba.

What were you?

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