Amanda West Lewis: Hello, my name is Amanda West Lewis. My parents gave me the name Amanda because it means worthy to be loved and they chose it because it expressed their love for each other. West is my middle name. Sometimes people think it is part of my last name, but West is after the British writer, Rebecca West, who invented her own name. My parents loved her writing, but also her feistiness and unconventionality. She wrote novels and was an important journalist, social essayist, and feminist. My last name, Lewis, comes from my father's family. His father and grandfather owned a jewelry store in Long Beach, California, called C. C. Lewis Jewelers, and I have a number of things from their store monogrammed with the name C. C. Lewis. So all in all, I have a new name with an old Latin root meaning love, an invented British name with a literary root to socialism, and an American name with a family connection to beautiful objects.