Did y'all hear about the nine-year-old girl in New Zealand named Talula Does the Hula? That's HER NAME. Her real and full name. Or it was until recently, anyway.

My luverly editor sent me an article about this poor girl. Apparently, her parents named her that because...ack, who knows? But in a custody hearing this year (her parents got divorced, go figure), the judge allowed her to rename herself, which she gratefully did. (And the article kept her new real name private--which I think is good!)

Other crazy names kids have been given: Midnight Chardonnay, Number 16 Bus Shelter, and Violence. (Can you imagine cooing to your itsy-bitsy baby and saying, "Shh, Violence. It's okay, Violence."??? Poor kid!)

Other crazy names that I myself have run across:
--the neighborhood kids next door to me when I was growing up, who were named Huey, Duey, Louie, Nippy (!!!!), and Daisy;
--my uncle, named Jerry Derriberri, who married (yes) a woman named Mary;
--a friend of my mom's named Olive Branch (like my mom, this woman was a teenager in the fifties);
--a kid at my school named Bitsy Human (yes, for you Rhymes with Witches readers, that's where I got Bitsy's name);
--and a fifty-five year old woman I once met on a plane named Blueberry Morning, a name I thought quite lovely. And then a cereal came out with that same name. Huh.

Other crazy names that I myself have been *responsible* for (okay, there's actually just one):

It's, um, Bliss Inthemorningdew. I know, I know, that's a horrible name to saddle a fourteen-year-old girl with, but in my defense, it wasn't really ME who named her. It was her parents. Her goofy Beatnik parents who legally changed their own last names in the process of "reinventing" themselves, and then burdened their poor daughter Bliss with that same insanity. (Except "Bliss" by itself is really pretty, don't y'all think?)

Bliss Inthemorningdew is the name of the main character in BLISS, which comes out this September. Check out the bloody cover. +makes spooky fingers+ Oooooo...




Anyway, more than a couple of peeps have read early copies and emailed me to ask about her name, so I thought I'd explain.

The novel takes place in 1969, which was a HUGE time of shifting ideas and social revolution and all that. Y'all know about Woodstock, right? And flower children? And (some) people running around with long hair and beaded necklaces, making peace signs with their fingers and maybe not taking as many baths as their mothers would have liked? Well, that's when Bliss grew up. In fact, she spent part of her childhood on a commune, feeding pigeons and eating goat cheese, which meant that she was super sheltered from "real world" horrors such as popularity issues and racism and classism and all that icky stuff. Her parents were goofs and a bit flaky, but they were open-minded, at least, and so Bliss got that from them. Which was a blessing.

To get back to Bliss's name. Ahem. Bliss's parents were hippies, yes, but BEFORE that, they were part of the Beat Generation. That's what form their rebellion took when *they* were Bliss's age. Do y'all know about Beatniks? Quick, what comes to mind?
--black berets
--girls in black stockings snapping their fingers
--slang like "hep" and "kooky" and "that Charlie Parker is one gone cat."

The Beatniks were all about challenging the "establishment" and being individuals and reinventing themselves, and it was the counterculture values of the Beat Generation that gave way to the hippie ideology of the sixties. Like, yeah, man. Famous Beatniks included Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski (boo, not my fave, though Clive in ttfn likes Charles Bukowski's poetry), and William Burroughs.

Jack Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums (loved) and On the Road (hated), and he described the Beat Geneation as “…a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.”

So, Bliss's parents were kinda like...hippies before hippies became cool. They *sure* weren't like Bliss's stiff and proper Atlanta Grandmother, whom Bliss ends up having to live with, and they *sure* weren't like Bliss's classmates (or their parents) at the stiff and proper prep school she ends up attending. (And, yeah, her fellow students find out about her name, and it isn't pretty. Poor Bliss!)

I plopped poor Bliss into this situation, in the very specific year of 1969, on purpose, though. I wanted her to be a "babe in the woods," although in Bliss's case, the woods she has to navigate (irony! bwahahaha!) is really high-society Atlanta in the sixties. I wanted her to be forced to wrap her mind around the horrors she discovers outside the commune, like the Manson murders, and the way her classmates think it's okay to use the word n***** to describe a black person, and the way that, JUST AS TODAY, there were expectations about how a girl was supposed to look and behave, and if you fell short of those expectations, there was hell to pay. (Did'ya notice the blood on the cover? Did ya, did ya? Hint: blood = not what you want splattered on your face on the night of the Winter Dance, no matter *what* beliefs you hold.)

What's interesting to me is that the early readers of the book all have different ideas about Bliss's name and why it is what it is, and how it came to be, and all that. Like, one girl emailed me and said, "My mom went through a renaming ceremony with her hippie parents. Is that what happened to Bliss?" While another reader was like, "Uh, sorry to burst your bubble, but no parent in their right mind would have given a kid a name like that IN THE FIFTIES." (To which I replied, "Who said Bliss's parents were in their right minds?" And then giggled. As I often do, all by myself, when I'm in front of the computer.)

For me, readers' questions about Bliss's name bring up the whole idea of what story is, and WHY stories exist, and all that good stuff. Because (for me!) stories aren't about Truth-with-a-capital-T, because I don't think there is such a thing. We all come at the world from different angles, and as William Faulkner said, "Facts and truth really don't have much to do with each other," anyway.

Once a book leaves my hands and is out there in YOUR hands, you get to bring something to it yourself. The experience of reading it becomes an interaction. I might think that Bliss's parents took on a new last name when they were immersed in the communal-ish salon lifestyle of 1955 San Francisco; you might think they had a funky renaming ceremony on the actual commune when Bliss was nine. Or you might think, "Malarkey. Malarkey to it all!"

That's cool. Don't get TOO hung up on the small stuff, though, ya know? Because whatever truth-with-a-small-t there may be out there, my personal opinion is that it's not usually found with a microscope and a scowl.