The Author Behind the Pseudonym Rebecca Morrow Was a Total Mystery—Until Now

Rowell with the “by Rebecca Morrow” edition of Corinne.

In the darkest hours of the COVID-19 pandemic—when the future seemed uncertain, and the rest of the world felt far away—I did something very strange for me. I wrote a book, knowing that I couldn’t let anyone read it.

“I just need to do this,” I told my literary agent. “And then I’ll write something we can sell.” It was a good time to sell. I’d just published three No. 1 bestsellers in a row. “I just need to get this out of me first.”

I wrote the first draft of the novel almost feverishly. It was about a woman who is cast out of her strict Christian church as a teenager and cut off by her family. She comes back home as an adult to reckon with the past—and with the man who was the catalyst for her exile.

Really, the book was about all the things I’d always been too scared to write about, or even to talk about….Faith. Shame. Sex. (More sex. Unclean sex. Forbidden sex. Sex in the same room as a Bible.) And, most thornily, how it feels to leave a fundamentalist church. The way you eventually realize that you can’t leave. That you’ll always take it with you, because you were made there. Baked there. Poured and set.

When I was done with the manuscript, it was my favorite thing I’d ever written. Maybe not my best book, but already the one I loved the most. “But honestly,” I told my agent, “we can’t do anything with this. It’s too personal. And it’s the very last thing any of my readers would want.” I was writing queer YA fantasy. Not whatever this was.

The new version of Corinne, with Rowell named as author, will be out in July 2027.

My agent, being an agent, asked if he could read it anyway. And he liked it. (He liked my beautiful baby!) We very quickly began talking about a way to publish the book that might sidestep all my fears and anxieties…. There began my strange—and still hardly believable to me—journey as Rebecca Morrow, the pseudonymous author of Corinne.

It was exciting at first. It was different and fun. A pseudonym! A secret identity! A way to drop a novel into the world without having to talk about it, or sell it. Without having to worry about alienating or recruiting my existing readers. The pseudonym satisfied that still feverish part of me that needed to let the story out, but was too terrified to stand by it.

Oh, I knew it was absurd to write a book about shame and secrets, and then to keep it a secret. (Don’t think this didn’t come up in therapy!) But at the time, it seemed like the only path forward for Corinne. It was this or let the characters die on my hard drive.

My editor and I agonized over how to handle the pseudonym. Traditionally, authors write fake biographies to go with their fake names. But I didn’t want to get caught in a lie if I was found out. And I didn’t want to seek out undeserved goodwill as a “debut author.”

The marketing department really wanted something they could say about Rebecca Morrow. They suggested “lives in Nebraska,” but even that felt like divulging too much. We settled on “Rebecca Morrow is a pseudonym for a New York Times bestselling author.”

Catch Us the Foxes, the Corinne sequel, will be out in March 2028.

My apologies to the bestselling, usually Mormon, authors who got blamed for this weird book. I didn’t see that coming. I did expect readers to guess that I was the author. Even though I’d freed myself to write Corinne in a new voice and shaken off some of my more recognizable habits, the book ended up sounding more like me than ever. It was like my voice distilled. Some people did guess. It didn’t bother me. I still didn’t have to talk about the book. I didn’t have to face it.

Corinne is my favorite of my books and beyond that, Enoch and Corinne, the man and woman at its center, are my all-time favorite characters. It’s hard to explain why…I always write messy, flawed characters, but these two are my messiest and most flawed. Their love is not the stuff of romance. (This novel is not a romance; it will disappoint you if you come to it looking for reassurance or escape.)

Neither Corinne nor Enoch is based on me, though they carry many of my burdens. This is not a hidden memoir. But they feel so real to me. They make mistakes, and I want to forgive them. I want them to find grace. I think about them still, all the time. I worry about what’s become of them.

Ultimately, that’s why I’m stepping forward to claim the book now. At some point, “not having to talk about Corinne” turned into “not being able to talk about Corinne,” even when I desperately wanted to. I love this book! I want to put it on my shelf, between Any Way the Wind Blows and Scattered Showers. I want readers who liked Slow Dance and Cherry Baby to discover it. I loved the characters in Corinne so much that I wrote a sequel about them—Catch Us the Foxes—and I want that book to have a life, too. William Morrow is launching both books, properly—Corinne next July, and Catch Us the Foxes in March 2028—in beautiful hardcover editions.

I revised Corinne for the new edition—I went a little deeper on the church stuff this time, and sharpened the focus on some of the characters. It’s a little longer. And, I think, a little better. My favorite designer, Jim Tierney, designed the new matching covers. I still get a surge of fear and excitement every time I see my name there front and center.

My therapist says that I’m very good at compartmentalizing—keeping some parts of myself shut away from other parts. I would argue that this is a very useful skill! But it does bad things to your soul, over time…being fractured like that. I built a compartment for Corinne. I kind of had to. But as the years have passed, it’s felt like I’ve left something half done. Like Corinne is a truth half shared. A story half told. I needed to get the book out of me, but I ended up cutting myself off from it. That was never the goal. I’m grateful to “Rebecca Morrow” for making Corinne possible, but I’m finally ready to bring these characters home.