“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman,” wrote Virginia Woolf. Today, Anonymous is probably an outraged employee in a public service: a member of the legal profession blowing the whistle on the system, or a medic who has seen one too many patients expiring on a trolley. This month the tally of the unknown author swells again, with the publication of Can You Hear Me?, a paramedic’s memoir published under the pseudonym Jake Jones.
For readers, the anonymous author holds a simple and compelling promise. Here is someone who – by concealing their identity – can reveal the complete and shocking truth. Many anonymous authors say this is precisely why they’ve chosen to remain hidden. The Secret Barrister, whose anonymous exposé of the criminal justice system was published in 2018, explains from behind the barrier of email: “Anonymity means I can criticise institutions, organisations and players in the justice system without feeling that I have to modify my commentary with a nervous eye on my real-life practice.”
Concern for their employment is a major reason cited by writers for going anonymous. Adam Kay, who published his medical memoir This is Going to Hurt under his own name in 2017, says he never thought to conceal his identity – because he had already left the profession. “There was no one to sack me and no one to strike me off,” he explains, and so no reason to keep his name off the book.
The possibility of identification does involve a certain degree of compromise with the truth, he acknowledges, if only to protect the dignity of the patients whose not always dignified exploits he recounts: “I had to anonymise and change details more than if my name wasn’t on it.” (The patient who has to have a condom-covered remote control removed from his rectum is, presumably, a composite.)
For the “explicitly gender neutral” Secret Barrister, namelessness enables her or him to be honest. But the trade-off between identity and honesty can be a complicated one. This is truth-telling predicated, after all, on a lie – perhaps the biggest lie possible, the denial of who you are. There is plenty of room for fiction to sneak in under the cover of the original fib.
Anonymity can also give critics an easy target, the Secret Barrister adds: “When, for example, some Guido-inspired troll suggests that I am a failed law student rather than a real barrister, I can’t whip out my practising certificate.” And if the anonymous author must engage in misdirection by necessity, it is surely tempting for the vainer or less scrupulous to make those misdirections tend in a flattering direction.
A Warning by Anonymous claims to be the work of a senior official in the Trump administration, but shows little sign of high-level access. As Julian Borger suggests, “By way of explanation for its surprising blandness, the author explains early on that too many details could compromise national security or help blow the writer’s cover.” Plausible, and also convenient if the author isn’t quite who they’re not saying they are.
Sometimes, anonymity can allow confession to shade knowingly into self-fictionalising. Under the pseudonym Belle de Jour, the writer Brooke Magnanti published two books that were marketed as memoir based on her time working as an escort – and then a third volume, written in the same style and character, but this time tagged as a novel. It’s a disconcerting manoeuvre, and one that plays dangerously with the trust an anonymous author demands.
Even if the author has no conscious desire to test the line between truth-telling and invention, anonymity can be deceiving. The essayist Leslie Jamison, in an article about the virtual world Second Life, writes that when people devise alter egos, they tend to eliminate characteristics such as race or disability that would mark them out in the real world. This can be freeing for players, but Jamison argues that it ultimately serves to “reinscribe the same skewed ideals … that sustain the unequal playing field in the first place”.
The same is true for anonymous writers, who by deleting anything identifiable can end up giving the impression of being the default type of human – white, male, classless. So while anonymity can allow anyone to have a voice, it can also have the effect of making those voices sound like all the voices we already know. Despite its intimations of total revelation, anonymity can still produce a strangely whitewashed version of the truth.
Perhaps this flatness is a result of the anonymous author having less at stake. As Kay points out, there are consequences to publishing under your own name: “I’ve had a fair amount of shit thrown at me, by people who disagree with me one way or the other, and that would have been very difficult if I was working.”
Anonymity doesn’t only allow writers to avoid attacks, the Secret Barrister adds, it also helps to raise the level of debate, because disagreement has to focus on substantive issues rather than personality. Ad hominem attacks are of limited value when the hominem in question is unknown.
With these protections in mind, the Secret Barrister hopes to stay secret for as long as possible. “I recognise that it’s likely to be a decision that is taken away from me; few anonymous writers successfully protect their identity forever.” Those who have been unmasked describe it as traumatic, but it is almost always disappointing for readers. “In real life I remain a resolutely mediocre barrister,” says the Secret Barrister.
And this is perhaps the final factor behind the recent wave of anonymous authors. Anonymity is exciting – so much so that marketing strategies can be built on the concealment and revelation of a writer’s identity. Kay talks admiringly of a “great stunt” by a journalist called Karl Webster who adopted the persona of an excruciatingly ugly man using the nom de plume Bête de Jour and ended up on the GMTV sofa with a paper bag covering his perfectly ordinary face. Secrecy sells. And that, as much as anything, is an argument for anonymity’s play of disclosure and deceit.
