I didn’t name my son after myself, but I can understand the impulse.
Fathers do it all the time. My own brother is named after my Dad. My cousin has a kid named after him; that cousin is named after my Uncle who is named after his father who was named after his father. I grew up in an evangelical household. I’m intimately familiar with the traditional, masculine authority that wants men to Name Things.
In the hit TV show Gilmore Girls, we aren’t looking at Fathers and Sons. We’re examining the life of a Mother and her Daughter. A teenaged mother, at that. Before the series begins, Lorelai Gilmore, only sixteen years old, gives birth. She names her daughter Lorelai, after herself, and that daughter goes by the nickname Rory. Ostensibly Lore...
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Kristen Arnett is the queer author of With Teeth: A Novel (Riverhead Books, 2021) which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and the New York Times bestselling debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, 2019) which was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in fiction and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She was awarded a Shearing Fellowship at Black Mountain Institute, has held residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Millay Colony, and the Key West Literary Seminar (upcoming 2024), and was longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize recognizing mid-career writers of fiction. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, TIME, The Cut, Oprah Magazine, Guernica, Buzzfeed, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, The Guardian, Salon, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Her next novel, CLOWN, will be published by Riverhead Books (Penguin Random House), followed by the publication of an untitled collection of short stories. She has a Masters in Library and Information Science from Florida State University and lives in Orlando, Florida. You can find her on Twitter here: @Kristen_Arnett
Kristen has written 4 articles for us.
