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publish.
    I was suddenly determined to use these few, precious weeks to write an entire novel that someone would publish.
    I started writing the book— that book—that day.
    I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing. At night, when the other artists blew off steam over dinner and fast games of Ping-Pong in the main lodge, I pretended I had spent the day hunched over my already spent second novel, but my head was spinning with new and very different characters, in altogether different situations (not to mention a vast array of positions). I did not tell my agent about the new book I was writing, because I had no intention of letting him represent it. This book, if it was ever going to be published, was going to be published under a pseudonym.
    Ah, the pseudonym! The thinking, feeling, writing woman’s armor, time tested and battle worn from its past wearers! Jane Austen went out into the world as “A Lady.” Molly Keane, the great girl-chronicler of her horsy, Anglo-Irish set, took her nom de plume, M. J. Farrell, from a pub sign she passed while hacking home from foxhunting, and never emerged as her glorious self until the age of seventy-six, with the publication of her comic masterpiece, Good Behaviour . Mary Ann Evans had to become George Eliot. The Brontë sisters all went undercover to write their tales of girls gone wild. Doris Lessing disguised herself in order to see whether her new work was publishable on its own merits or merely because she was Doris Lessing—a fascinating, somewhat depressing experiment for all involved. The book was the extraordinary Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983).
    I had no such nobility of purpose. I was not defying the sexist literary barricade with one of the few tools at my disposal, nor was I cloaking my identity in order to more witheringly satirize my chums. I was not proving a point, à la Lessing, about how publishing stifles new voices in order to spend more money on marquee names. (I should be so lucky as to be a marquee name!) I did it for the worst reason of all. I did it to hide, pure and simple. I did it because the only way I was ever going to be able to write this vividly about sex was to pretend I was someone else, and never ever tell . (What, I have always wondered, is the point of an acknowledged pseudonym? Anne Rice wrote the fairly mind-bending erotica under her pseudonym, Anne Rampling, but if she was going to own up to it, why go to the trouble? Her revealed subterfuge seemed, to me, more embarrassing than the erotica itself.)
    It’s logical to assume that my pseudonym, that firewall between myself and the graphic nature of my subject, performed some sort of freeing alchemy for me as I wrote. After all, Repressed Female Locates Inner Sensualist Merely by Donning Mask is a well-worn scenario, but the actual effect wasn’t quite so dramatic. My pseudonym did perform this duty only to the extent that it enabled me to get the words on the page; after that, the effect dissipated into nothingness. In my life beyond that novel, even during the actual two weeks it took me to write it, absolutely nothing changed. I might arrive in the colony dining hall each evening after a full day of lips, tongues, organs, and secretions, restraints and responses, but by the time I sat down at the dinner table I had returned to my natural state of unreconstructed prude. (In fact I was appalled at a real life—and very hot—affair between two of the resident artists, one of them married.) And did the thrust (so to speak) of my subject matter at least have an impact on my sex life with my husband? I wouldn’t dream of telling you . Ick! None of your business!
    The truth is that I wouldn’t be able to answer that question even if I wanted to, because I don’t remember much of anything about those two weeks. I’ve driven the whole business from my mind. Writing fiction has always been something of an out-of-the-body experience for me, and it isn’t at all unusual for me to read a