The American conceptual artist and author Brian O'Doherty published several essays and exhibition reviews between 1971 and 1973 under his only female pseudonym, Mary Josephson, including in Art in America, of which he was the editor at that time. In 1988, he wrote the short story "The History of X" for Artforum. O'Doherty himself revealed the identities of his four alter egos about 40 years later in his lecture "Divesting the Self: A Striptease," which was published in 2012 in The Recorder. About Mary Josephson, he wrote: "I wanted to think and write as a female person to free myself from my constraining masculinity; I wanted to allow a different inner voice – that voice that never stops speaking and never leaves us alone." In the early 1970s, Mary Josephson was the only fictional art critic.