When I sit down with old friends who, like me, are in their 70s, I sometimes ask: “If you could live your life again, would you do anything differently?” Most just scratch their heads and say, “I dunno.” Recently, I told three old friends that I would do one thing differently: I would get a middle initial—either Q or X—to distinguish myself from the many Stephen Millers who write books. Or I would give myself a full middle name—say, Xavier or Quentin.
In my youth and middle age, my very common name—the White Pages lists 98 Stephen Millers in Virginia, but I bet there are more—was only a minor problem at airports and department stores. At least four times, I heard a request for Stephen Miller to please come to the reservation desk or information counter. It always turned out to be another Stephen Miller; but I would get a shot of adrenaline every time I heard my name, thinking that something terrible had happened to someone in my family.
I also endured the weak jokes of innumerable sales clerks, who would say to me, “So, are you the Steve Miller of the Steve Miller band?” To which I responded sarcastically, “Yeah, right.” And once I got a 1099 Tax Statement for Miscellaneous Income from a newspaper, although that year I hadn’t written anything for it. I contacted them about the mistake, but they never replied. I didn’t feel like trying to straighten this out (it was a small amount), so on that year’s tax return I listed income that I had never received for an article that I had never written.
The misattribution problem did not become serious until 2006, when I published Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. First, several letters addressed to me care of Yale University Press were sent to another Stephen Miller published by Yale: a distinguished classicist who writes on ancient Greek athletics. Second, on many bookstore websites, I was wrongly described as the author of two biographies and several historical novels.
My corpus of books got much larger after the publication of my actual latest book, Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole. I was happy to see that Walmart was selling my book, but it incorrectly listed me as the author of Sweet Blonde, a biography of Dolly Parton. And I soon found out that on the websites of many independent bookstores, I am described in the following way: “Stephen Miller currently teaches courses in Zoology, Biology and Invertebrate Zoology at the College of the Ozarks, Point Lookout, MO (Branson). He is also the author of General Zoology Lab Manual.”
I emailed one bookstore to tell them that I am not a zoologist. They said it was not their fault: The information about me was given to them by a central book information service. They could do nothing about it. I got the same response from another independent bookstore. I wrote to my publisher to see if they could do something about the misattribution, but I have not yet received a reply.
Because my book is being sold on websites around the world, the problem of misattribution is not confined to the United States. The list of books attributed to me varies by country. On a Spanish website, I am the author of La Mensajera (The Messenger). On several German websites, I’m the author of a biography of Johnny Cash. On a Dutch website, I am the author of several books, including Hawaii by Sextant and Piwik Web Analytics Essentials. On a Polish website, I’m the author of From Fat to Fit: The Simple Way to Transform Your Family Health as well as Starting and Running a Sandwich-Coffee Bar.
On many websites in Europe and Asia, I have a middle initial: H. Why the H. when the name on the book jacket is Stephen Miller? There are several authors named Stephen H. Miller, including a Stephen H. Miller who wrote Year Book of Plastic and Aesthetic Surgery, but there are also several authors named Stephen G. Miller. I have not yet found an author named Stephen X. Miller.
Is this misattribution a joke being played on me by the shade of Jorge Luis Borges or Franz Kafka? I can see myself as a character in a short story who is trying to find the Transnational Ministry of Author Information, which is located either in a castle in Transylvania or in a strip mall in suburban Los Angeles. If I ever get in touch with these incompetent bureaucrats, I will say, “I want to be disambiguated. Now!”
I could address the misattribution problem by having a Wikipedia entry, but I am reluctant to set up one myself. It smacks too much of self-promotion. I could construct my own website, but one already exists. If you Google “Stephen Miller Author,” you will find a website: stephenmillerwriter.com. The Author’s Official Website. But this is not me. The same author also has stephenmillerwriter.org. My website would have to include my birth date in the address.
Lately I have begun to wonder if I should be so concerned about misattribution. Perhaps being described as the author of a wide variety of books is good for sales. I can see a would-be reader saying, “This guy is amazing. He is a scientist and a literary guy—a renaissance man!” So maybe I should say: Let a Thousand Misattributions Bloom. But often I daydream of publishing a book with the name Stephen X. Miller.
Stephen Miller is the author, most recently, of Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole
