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By Leah Greenblatt

Dear readers,

Where did all the Brendas go? The Donnas and Debbies, Sharons and Carols? I wondered that the other day after meeting a friend’s beautifully scrunchy newborn for the first time — a tiny bread loaf fresh to the world, whose name fell refreshingly far down the current list of popular choices. According to the people who compile these things, parents of the 2020s have enthusiastically embraced the brass-fixture nomenclature of characters in an Edith Wharton novel, or at least HBO’s “The Gilded Age,” with every Brooklyn daycare now hosting a small army of Evelyns, Elijahs, Amelias and Olivers.

I grew up in a certain pocket of California kookery where unusual was the default: My best friends had names like Melon and Panama, and even the adults we knew seemed free to redefine themselves as Hindu gods or whimsical shades of the color wheel. My own birth name marked me as unconventional too, so as a teenager I took the opportunity of a family move to change it. (In junior high school, it has been empirically proved, freak flags are best flown at lower altitudes.)

Overwhelmed by options — should I be a bird, a tree, a TV star? — I panicked and reverted to a name that already ran in the family. A perfectly fine one! Easy to spell and only occasionally mispronounced like the galactic princess with the buns in her hair. But even now, I feel a little detached from “Leah,” a designation that floats politely adjacent to me but is still not quite mine.