“That’s a great name,” the receptionist says to me as I sign into a gym class. I get this a lot. Teachers, postmen, secretaries, they always have a comment to make about my name. “Sounds like someone important!” a nurse said to me recently as she filled in the details of my hospital band. I still don’t know how to respond – I can’t exactly take credit for it. But it has become a pathetic point of pride, and sitting there in ill health I thought: “Well, at least I’ve still got that going for me.”
This illusion came crashing down when the receptionist excitedly turned to me as she realised: “Oh wait! It’s like Molly-Mae!” This was the second time in as many weeks that someone had suggested I shared my name with the influencer and Love Island demigod Molly-Mae Hague (she is engaged to boxer Tommy Fury). “Well the spelling’s different,” I could hear myself stuttering in what sounded like a sad, sad attempt to reclaim something that, evidently, was never even mine.
Up until this point, I have smugly avoided the struggle of the Mary Murphys and Seán O’Connors of the world. Neither my first nor second name is obscure, and yet my full name has always stood out on life’s roll calls.
So standing there as just some other Molly Fur(e)y, humbled by this receptionist’s critical spelling error, I had to wonder: what is in a name? Can our identity be wrapped up in it or is it just some random jumble of letters used to identify us? Shakespeare’s Juliet was sure of the latter when she first said (“a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, etc), but I have always felt my name was as specific to me as my fingerprint. Living in the name-shadow of £6 million-worth of blonde and beauty, however, I’ve had to question the vanity of such an assumption.
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“You are such a Molly,” people have said to me. I do not know what this means, but it is always satisfying to hear. Implicit in the flippant remark is the grand suggestion that by some stroke of luck my parents managed to land on the exact mix of sounds and letters that captured my essence when naming me. My dad is, as ever, less existential about the matter. “Well every Tom, Dick and Harry was called Rachel,” he tuts, laughing at his own joke. “But you did just look like a Molly,” he shrugs, further enmeshing my sense of self with the name. Is it any wonder that a name-doppelgänger has inspired such a crisis of identity?
The year I was born, 1999, Molly was the 63rd most popular baby name for girls in Ireland. Compared to the 615 Chloes born that year, a paltry 73 Mollys arrived. By 2024, it had jumped 41 places to 22nd most popular but, in 2021 it hit its peak, ranking 18th with 219 Mollys named.
Standing at a traffic light as a woman coos at her baby named Molly, I am confronted with this veritable rise before my very eyes. “There are four other Mollys in her creche!” she explains to me when I ask her about it. “It’s trendy at the moment.”
I am winded by the accusation that my name is merely fashionable, offended at the implication that it is basic and, therefore, that I am too. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate with the Molly-Mae of it all, I now have the impending banality of my first name to worry about.
I am not the first to feel threatened by my name-doppelgängers. In 2021, fuelled by what he described in a Reddit post as “a spell of pandemic boredom”, Arizona college student Joshua Swain created the Swainbowl: an event for all Joshua Swains to come together and “fight for the right to keep this common name”. Armed with pool noodles and a lifetime’s worth of anonymous frustration, hundreds of Joshes duelled in a park in Lincoln, Nebraska.
I do not necessarily feel the need to challenge Molly-Mae to a duel (although I have not ruled out the distinct possibility that she may want to challenge me), but I do quite like the idea of gathering all of my name-doppelgängers in the one place. Maybe my defensiveness would be quelled if I just got a good look at them all – compared notes, heard about what they have done with the name, got to the bottom of what it means to be “such a Molly”.
[ Molly-Mae Hague denies Tommy Fury break-up and documentary are ‘publicity stunt’ ]
I suppose the idea that there is something inherently “you” about your name is what makes it so uncanny to meet people with the same one. They offer a foil to your little life, or rather a distorted mirror that makes you consider all of the parallel lives you could have led. This Molly Fur(e)y managed to be a doctor! This one is a businesswoman! This one is an influencing millionaire!
Placing my urge to out-Molly Fur(e)y all of them aside, perhaps there is a camaraderie to be found in that. Maybe I should hold my name-doppelgängers in the same bracket as Irish heads spotted abroad or people wearing the same jumper as you on the street – familiar strangers. Should I ever come across Molly-Mae, I will offer her the knowing nod reserved for such encounters, and I will be sure to tell her just what a great name I think she has.
