INTERVIEW WITH NICOLE DUBOIS, AUTHOR OF UNPARALYZED by Autumn Konopka • Cleaver Magazine

Interview by Autumn Konopka
YOU CAN ONLY BE ONE PERSON:
A Conversation About Vulnerability vs. Pseudonyms with Memoirist Nicole Dubois

Nicole DuBois considered herself “the quintessential twenty-first century liberated woman”—a successful professional, self-sufficient individual, devoted mother, committed wife. By the time she reached her mid-30s, she’d done what she considered necessary to achieve her “little Jamaican-American dream.” Only, her marriage seemed nearly over, and her health was flagging, too. After weeks of extreme and unusual numbness and exhaustion, Nicole was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. Faced simultaneously with divorce and a degenerative illness, she began writing.

Unparalyzed: Beating an Invisible Pre-Midlife Crisis (Archway Publishing) is about taking control of your life when everything seems out of control. The story is deeply personal and honest, told with the kind of humor and self-awareness that make the narrator feel like a friend.

This was the story Nicole had needed herself but had not been able to find. It’s also the story she wasn’t sure she should share: Could she really be so vulnerable? What would her coworkers and colleagues think? So Nicole replaced her own name with a pseudonym, Danielle M. Bryan. Now, she has removed the mask and reclaimed her story. In this interview, Nicole discusses her powerful memoir of resilience and growth as well as the transformation she experienced emerging from the anonymity of a pseudonym into the fullness of herself.

Autumn Konopka: Tell me a little bit about Unparalyzed and what prompted you to write it?

Nicole DuBois: I was going through a series of challenges when I was in my mid-30s—as a woman, a married woman, and a mother—which included a divorce and diagnosis of a really serious chronic illness: relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. I found some similar stories, but not one that exactly mirrored my own experiences. So I determined that, since I couldn’t find a story just like mine, I was going to write the story, and hopefully, my journey, my experience, me putting words to paper, would be an inspiration to at least one person.

Initially, it was a part of my own process of dealing. I would escape to Starbucks, and I would spend all day on a Saturday, all day on a Sunday, just typing, typing, typing. I took two solo trips that year: to Arizona and to Greece. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. It really was a part of my process of sort of navigating all those challenges.

Autumn: You released the book under the pseudonym Danielle M Bryan. Why did you do that?

Nicole: I am a human resources executive for an organization where I’ve worked for 19 years, and when I was deciding to publish this deeply personal memoir, one of the things that I was really struggling with internally was how my story would land with either our workforce or our board or my boss. Could I put such a personal journey out there in the world? I hadn’t even shared my diagnosis with most people. My family’s Caribbean, and, I’m not going to speak for the whole culture, but at least in my family, you keep things close to your vest. You don’t tell your business to people. And so I felt like I had to sort of keep things private.

Autumn: At what point in the writing process did you decide to use a pseudonym: before you began, as you were writing, or after you’d finished?

Nicole: The latter. I worked with a hybrid publisher, and right when they were about to publish, their legal team advised me to publish under a pseudonym. I had changed the names of characters—my ex-husband, all that—and they were like, “Even if you change the names of others, it would be safest if you change your name.” I had already been struggling with whether I should put this out there. And then, I got that advice—it was maybe a couple of weeks before publication—so I went through [the manuscript] and changed it.

Autumn: In the book, when you are going through the process of being diagnosed, there’s a scene in which the doctor calls for you as “Ms. Bri-ann,” and from that point on, you sometimes try to imagine that things are happening to Ms. Bri-ann instead of you. I wonder if you took that kind of mindset to using the pseudonym—sort of like dissociating—or if you were in it as yourself?

Nicole: I was, in that actual moment, trying to almost disassociate myself from what was going on. The doctor had a very strong accent, and so I was just like, “Oh, maybe it’s somebody else he’s talking about.” But no, the pseudonym was completely unrelated; I was in it as myself.

Autumn: You mentioned earlier that, culturally, you’re inclined to keep it close to the vest. So, how did your family and friends react to the book?

Nicole: In general, it’s been positive. The person who was the funniest was my mother. So, she reads the book, and first she’s like, “Oh, this is so well written” and all this stuff, and then somehow, by the middle of the book her whole narrative was the whole book is about her. “How did you write this book about me?” So she had probably the strongest reaction to it. But she made peace with it, and now she’s super proud.

My son is now fourteen. I haven’t shared the whole book with him, but at the end, there’s a note to him. So I shared that with him a few months ago. I sat with him as he read it, so that was actually pretty special.

Autumn: How did he react?

Nicole: He cried—but happy tears.

Autumn: You published Unparalyzed independently, which means carrying all, or nearly all, of the work of marketing, promotions, sales, etc. It seems like that would be especially challenging with the book published under an alias. How did you manage it?

Nicole: First of all, that was not my original goal. Once I decided, Okay, this is actually shaping up to be something, of course my first thought was “let me try traditional.” And I knew I was up for a huge challenge there. I’m not Michelle Obama. I don’t have a huge platform. Nobody knows who the heck this person is. So I knew [all of that], but I still decided to give it an honest shot. Then I got to the point where I was like, Okay, what’s most important here? Is it publishing traditionally? Is it huge book sales? Or is it seeing this through and sharing my story? And when I determined that it was the latter, then I was fine [with publishing independently].

I think when I decided it was going to be a pseudonym—if I would do it over again, I would change it. First of all, the book cover: I couldn’t even put a picture of myself. It was so weird when I saw that. And I had to have two sets of social media accounts. I have my LinkedIn, which probably has almost 7,000 followers, but I couldn’t really be out and open about my book there. So I had to create a separate IG, and I named it just Unparalyzed. As people purchased, they would take pictures and send them to me to post. And I was like, This feels so sterile. It just felt so weird to have this separation, to feel like I was talking about this person’s experience and triumph over some major freaking life challenges. But that person was me.

What really tipped it over the edge was an experience that I had when I did my first book Expo last fall. At that Expo I had this giant, blow-up version of my book cover, custom tablecloth, custom bookmarks, all this. I’m so excited. People are coming up asking me about the book, and I’m like, “Hi, I’m Nicole, but I publish under a pseudonym.” It felt like I was tripping over my words.

The woman that was giving a keynote worked in branding, and she asked authors, how do we brand and market ourselves and our books? So I take the mic, and I’m explaining to her, “I’m an HR executive, and I wrote this book under a pseudonym because I felt like I couldn’t share …” And she said to me, “I get exactly what you’re saying, but I need you to hear something: You can only be one person, and everything that has happened to you and all of your experiences are all a part of your identity and who you are. Anyone that has an issue with that—that’s their problem.” I’m telling you, it was a light bulb moment, and from that point forward, I began taking baby steps and tiptoeing into identifying myself as the person behind the story, and that’s been powerful.

Autumn: Has anything changed around the book or for you, since you’ve kind of attached your real identity to it?

Nicole: It’s just been damn freeing. After that Book Expo, I talked to my boss about it. I let her know, and she was happy. Then I put up a post on LinkedIn. When I first published the book, I put it on LinkedIn, but I was like, “My friend wrote this book.” Then after all of this, I put up a post, I identified myself, and I explained my reason for initially publishing it under a pseudonym. After that, the response has been crazy. I got my first paid speaking engagement. People have reached out to ask me to be on their podcasts, to invite me to speak about my journey, and to thank me for being vulnerable The thing is that it’s no longer two separate things; I have been talking about my book, even in the context of leadership—like authenticity and leadership, and vulnerability and leadership. For me, it’s been a gift, because me taking that risk, being vulnerable, and sharing who I am—the fullness of who I am—I think, has encouraged others to take risks themselves, which has been really cool.

Autumn: Will there be new versions of the book with your name on it?

Nicole: You know, I’ve really thought about it. I would have to go through a whole republishing process, and there’s the expense attached to that, which is not a whole lot of fun. But also, I’m not going to republish that book with my name because, to me, it’s almost like I would be erasing history, and that’s unnecessary. I think there’s another story in me. I think there’s even a story about this whole freaking experience. I think there are other stories that I want to tell under my name, but I don’t want to retell that story under my name. I think that’s a part of real experience: In that moment I felt like I needed to have distance from my name in telling that story for myriad reasons. Then I went through this whole period of understanding myself better, of enlightenment, and leaning into the fullness of who I am. I don’t want to undo that, or erase that, or pretend that hasn’t happened.

Nicole DuBois (she/her) is a non-profit executive leader and a mentor by day. She is a proud Jamaican-American, a wife, a mother, a daughter, and an avid lover of international travel. So far, Nicole’s international travel destinations have included the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, France, Greece, Indonesia , Jamaica, Mexico, Morocco, South Africa, Turkey, Italy, Belize, Canada, England, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Portugal and Spain. Similar to her passion for traveling, Nicole developed a love for expressing herself through written words and story-telling. She describes her debut memoir, published under a pseudonym, as the story that found her after life threw her a few curve balls; she decided to use her journey and the lessons she learned along the way to inspire others. The choice to publish under a pseudonym mirrors the burden many professionals bear as they remain masked, suppressing those experiences which make them human and showing up in the workplace as they believe they need to in order to be accepted. Today, Nicole stands fully in her story. She now shares the book under her real name. Proudly. Unmasked.

Autumn Konopka is the Senior Editor for Book Reviews and Author Interviews at Cleaver Magazine. She is a former poet laureate of Montgomery County, PA (2016) and author of the award-winning novel Pheidippides Didn’t Die (2023) and the poetry chapbook, a chain of paperdolls (2014). A runner, mental health advocate, and trauma-informed teaching artist, Autumn lives outside of Philadelphia and finds joy in coffee, rainbows, reggaetón, and (of course) books.