By Many Other Names

The story of my name and how I changed it

Back in March, I met a woman who told me a story about how she changed her name. When Fabrizia* was 9 years old, she told her mother and grandmother she did not want to be called by her full first name anymore. “I have to write out the whole long name at school and I don’t want to do that, I want to be called Fabi,” she said. They said they weren’t going to call her the diminutive version of her name. “Then I won’t respond to you at all,” she told them with all the insistence that a 9-year-old hell-bent on winning an argument can muster. It took a week of ignoring calls to dinner and other requests for her family to accept that she was serious.

This story awed me because I am well acquainted with the desire to change one’s name, how difficult it can be to get others to call you by your chosen name, and how, despite your best efforts, people will still get it wrong. I’ve written poems and Twitter threads about the name I was given at birth and how I chose my new name, and what’s happened in the nearly 30 years since I changed it. The story of my name makes for fun dinner conversation and personal trivia.

My legal name was Corylyn Rae and everyone called me Corry, except for my paternal grandmother. I’m not sure what the original source material was for my name; it sounds very Southern yet both of my parents were originally from Michigan. I seem to recall Momcat telling me a friend of a friend used a similar name for her daughter. The diminutive version was spelled with two r’s and not one, because my parents thought the extra r made it more feminine. No one ever got my legal name right in the instances when I had to use it: the pronunciation and/or spelling was either Carolyn or Coralyn. But I could be with my nickname, and in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Corry became more common, thanks to two young actors and a pop star, all of them named Corey. Yet my full legal name was awful to my ears, a mishmash that did not in any way reflect who I was, or who I wanted to be. At one point I attempted to get people to call me Lynne, but I couldn’t get used to it, nor could anyone else.