There are 5,339 Americans With My Name

and how they became a problem for me

I long ago gave up hope that my name could trigger anything more than a yawn. It’s so perfectly WASP-ish and unremarkable. Snore. There have already been a bunch of authors with my name. A poet laureate. Titans of industry. I even bumped into a Ph.D. sociologist with my name while doing my literature review in graduate school. That was insanely too clos…