SUCH A SUE

I used to have a shelf full of baby name books, collected over the years from thrift stores and yard sales across Canada. These books were often filled with little handwritten lists of baby names in some unknown person’s handwriting, and I was always fascinated by the names people considered for their children. Sometimes the lists were written in scratchy, bold letters, and I could only assume they were written by children who, like me, would search through these books for hours to find fitting names for the characters in their stories.

I wasn’t always sure if my own name suited me, but I could never imagine what it would be like to be someone else. Then, when I was fifteen, I began my first job as a movie theatre attendant and was given the first hand opportunity to see what it is like to live with someone else’s name. Along with the ever-so-flattering golf t-shirt and matching baseball hat of my uniform, I was also supposed to wear a badge with my name spelled out in bold black letters. Unfortunately, my badge did not arrive on my first day of work, so in the interim, I was loaned a former employee’s nametag.

I still remember standing outside my manager’s office as she looked over a corkboard wall of nametags, trying to choose one for me. I looked forward to walking around with a cute name like Lacy or Tiffany, to see if they were treated differently than people named Diana. Finally, my manager pulled a flashy silver badge from the wall and said, “Here, you look like Sue.”

Now, while I wasn’t sure I felt like a Diana at the time, I can tell you with one hundred percent certainty that I did not feel like a Sue. To me, she was someone a lot older, greyer, and frumpier than I was then. Yet I wore that nametag for an entire month without complaint, smiling through as someone loudly remarked, “You are such a Sue.” Thankfully, anyone else who felt the need to comment on my name only did so to remark that the name didn’t suit me at all.

I come from a family of women named after literary characters. My mum, for Wendy Darling of Peter Pan and Wendy fame, and my gramma, for the titular Anne of Green Gables. I was named for Diana Barry, another character from this book. I was also named for the late Princess of Wales, and while I never matched the tall, blonde image that has become associated with her, I did feel a certain kinship with the raven haired best friend of Anne Shirley. I often wonder if the reason I received so many comments on a plain name like Sue was because it was new to me. Maybe I didn’t hold myself like Sue, or walk like a Sue, because I didn’t know how to be anyone but Diana.

I love that the women in my family took such great care when naming their daughters, and I feel just as strongly about the way I name the characters in my books. I like to know the reason behind their names, and to know they’ve walked their entire lives with their moniker. This was important to me when naming Aurie, the main character in my novel Somewhere Picking Dandelions. Although I removed the reason behind her name from the novel’s final draft, it was still an important part of developing the character.

Aurie’s full name is Aurelia. While planning the story, I knew I wanted her parents to be people who cared about the names they gave their children, who put thought that went a little further than the top ten most popular names of the 1940s. I know there are names we hear at points in our lives that we think sound fantastic, and this was the basis for Aurie’s name.

When Ramona Quimby called her doll Chevrolet, it was because she thought it was the most beautiful name in the world. When I fell in the love with the name Meronica as a child, it was because I had no idea that someone had mispronounced Veronica. When Maisie Hargrove, Aurie’s mother, heard of the town Aurelia as a child, she had no idea that she was mishearing the name of a place called Orillia. So while she thought Aurelia sounded like a wonderful place, she never could locate it on a map, because it didn’t exist where she was looking. She named her daughter Aurelia anyway, because she loved the sound of it.

As the actual giver of the name, I liked the way it blended a familiar, yet unique sound. As I later discovered in my research, Aurelia was the 728th most popular name in 1941, the year Aurie was born. It seemed like perfect name for a headstrong little girl who felt as though she never quite fit in with her family. Although the origins of her name aren’t told in the story, I hope the spirit of her moniker rings as strong for her character as it would in real life.