Three kinds of pseudonyms

1 When JK Rowling was a little girl her fantasy self was named Ella Galbraith. If Ella Galbraith was like my childhood fantasy self she was a handsome deep-sea explorer with straight hair, a plucky secret agent with a high endurance for pain, a spitfire pilot and Brooke Shields's boyfriend.

When she chose a pseudonym for her crime novel, The Cuckoo's Calling, Rowling became Robert Galbraith, a male version of her ideal childhood self. When what newspapers call the truth was revealed last week you sensed a zillion people crouched on the edge of indignation. The public does not like to be deceived. It wants you to be who it says you are.

I don't read JK Rowling - is The Half-Blood Prince a biography of Prince Harry? - but I admire her. For several years she had the hardest job in the world. Next time you lie down to sleep, imagine a planet of children desperate to know what happens next in the story you're telling, trusting you won't let them down, wondering what's taking you so long. On Rowling rested the imaginative lives, the dreams, of kids in Malta and Malaysia and Bangalore and Cheam. The first books came out at a rate of one a year; the fifth took three. Those were not three years of Mai-Tais and Facebook updates.

When it was over and she was a billionaire she might have done nothing. Instead she wrote a 500-page adult novel under her own name. This is a feat of hard work and industry, but mostly bravery. Writing hard makes you vulnerable; so does knowing there are seven continents of humans waiting to take revenge for your success.

For her second adult novel Rowling gave up her name. Perhaps it was easy to give away. When you repeat any word aloud too many times it starts sounding strange to your ears, even when the word means you. Perhaps it began before that: Rowling first published Harry Potter under her real name, Joanne. She has no second name; the K is invented. In the early days she corrected everyone who mispronounced "Rowling" but as time passed it bothered her less. The more public you become, the less the name in the newspaper signifies you.

When Robert Galbraith was unmasked, Joanne Rowling was wistful. It had been an opportunity to go back to the beginning, and perhaps before that, a chance to write without the flattery of fame or the insecurity of youth and to belong only to herself and to her childhood self. It's a beautiful idea. Whatever you think of her writing, only a real writer would do it.

2. After the success of his book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, TE Lawrence became Lawrence of Arabia, the most famous soldier in the world. He was uncomfortable with fame and uncomfortable with himself. Lawrence was neither his father's nor his mother's name: they were unmarried and borrowed it from her former employers. At the height of his fame Lawrence left Lawrence behind and recruited into the RAF under the name JH Ross. He stayed in happy obscurity as an enlisted man until rumbled by the press. He lay low, then re-recruited into the Tank Corps as TE Shaw. He had a fantasy of dissolving himself into duty and obedience.

There is a sense Lawrence never really knew who he was, but giving up his public name was his way of trying to make the best of that. It wasn't success he wanted, it was the work.

3. After New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner's first sexting scandal in 2011, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart called him and told him to remember that the "Anthony Weiner" being lampooned in the media was no longer him but a two-dimensional invention of fame. "You do have a responsibility," he told him, "but it's not to us." It was good advice, poorly understood. Weiner changed his online name to Carlos Danger and kept exposing the least important part of himself.

I'm neither his wife nor the NSA: Anthony Weiner's digital fantasy life is none of my business. I wish sending inappropriate texts was the worst behaviour I've ever committed. But it's clear that Anthony Weiner is in some kind of flight from "Anthony Weiner", and Carlos Danger isn't a retreat to some purer form of himself.

He'd be right if he just told the world like a Frenchman: "This doesn't concern you", but instead he gives news conferences to convince the public that the public face is the real face, that the private Anthony Weiner is a mistake and Carlos Danger is only a false Zapata moustache on the face of someone who isn't real. For Anthony Weiner, "Anthony Weiner" is the real pseudonym. When you try to convince yourself that the public you is the real you, it's not the work you want, it's the success.