When my daughter, Emmy, met her first-year Penn State roommate, Taylor, online this summer, the young women exchanged full names for their roommate request forms.

“Emerson is your full name?” Taylor texted. “It’s really pretty! My mom thought so, too.”

“Yeah,” Emmy replied. “My mom gave us all literary names. I’m named after Ralph Waldo Emerson. My older brother, Sawyer, is named after Tom Sawyer, and my little brother, Wilder, after Laura Ingalls Wilder.”

“That is actually so badass,” messaged Taylor. “I aspire to name my kids after literary legends like your mom.”

As for my own first name, it did not come from literature. Nor did it come from Greek mythology. You know the story — the ill-fated Cassandra, able to see the future with utter clarity but cursed by Apollo to be believed by no one. So many times, I had to explain that wasn’t even close to what my mother had in mind. She’d been just 13 when she heard it on the original vampire soap opera, Dark Shadows, swearing that if she one day had a daughter, she would name her Cassandra, just like the show’s witch. Nine years later, I was born.

“But she was just so beautiful,” my mom said, telling me, in her defense, about how my name had a dark side. Never mind that she was not a good witch by any stretch of the imagination.As a teenager myself, I’d landed on the name Hadley if I ever had a girl. Ah, Hemingway’s wife, right? Alas, that’s not my source. You see, I grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts. We weren’t far from charming places you may have heard of, like Northampton and Amherst. Nestled between them is the quaint village of Hadley and below that, naturally, is South Hadley, home to my favorite woodsy escape during my high school years: Skinner Mountain. I took countless hikes there with my dad or with friends, sometimes both.

Nearby was a café called the Thirsty Mind, still there today. After a fall hike, we’d reward ourselves with giant chocolate chip cookies and steaming cups of hot cocoa. Or my pals and I would venture there at night, sipping tea and playing Chinese checkers or one of the many other well-loved games the shop had lying around. All that to say, South Hadley holds a special place in my New England-loving heart.

So, when my husband, Chris, and I found ourselves preparing for our first child in 2005, I was sure I was carrying little miss Hadley. That is, until the doctor pointed out that I may want to consider Hudson versus Hadley because there on the ultrasound were very clear boy parts. I spent the next couple of months agonizing over names. As an Enneagram type four (the personality-type system’s “individualist”), I wanted a name I’d never heard on another person before. The English major in me thought perhaps literature could inspire me and I recalled the collections of novels my brother and I had on our shelves as children. One stood out: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

“Sawyer,” I said aloud to Chris.

It was a good, strong name, he agreed. What he didn’t dare tell me was that there was a character named Sawyer on his current favorite television show, Lost, which began airing just a few months before I found out I was pregnant. By the time someone mentioned it to me, I was already calling the growing baby in my belly Sawyer. It was a done deal.

When Sawyer was 9 months old, we found out his little sister was on the way. And while I still loved the name Hadley, its time had passed.

“What about Emilia?” I asked Chris. “Emilia Bustamante. Doesn’t that sound pretty? And we could call her Emmy.”

“Sounds too Spanish,” he replied dryly.

“Um, you are Cuban,” I said.

“I do like Emmy, though,” he said.

With that in mind, I continued to ponder names. What else could I shorten to Emmy?

Emma? Too common.

Emmet? All I could picture was a washtub-bass-playing Muppet otter.

Emerson, as in Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet, writer, philosopher? Sign this literary-lover up!

Years later, when the last of our gaggle of children was due to arrive, I decided he had to follow the precedent we set with his siblings — a name inspired by a writer or literary character. I was not a Thornton Wilder fan, so apologies to those who think the baby of our family, Wilder, was named for him. But Laura Ingalls Wilder? Yes, indeed. I’ll take Little House over Our Town any day. So infatuated was I as a child that my mother sewed me a floral dress, apron and bonnet so that I could not only appreciate Laura, but I could channel her, too.

And now Wilder will have to go through life probably explaining to people, “No, no. My mom’s a big book nerd, but it’s not that playwright Thornton dude or even the kid from the novel White Noise. Nope — I’m named after some little girl who lived in some little house on some great big prairie.”

“But she was a brilliant writer,” I’ll tell him! And I’ll remind him of the quote of hers I had over his crib when he was a baby: “Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let’s be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.” Like a good name.