“I’m trying to be quiet and gather strength to be a voice of encouragement for you loons, who somehow need me and somehow found me,” tweeted Duchess Goldblatt in early June.
If you don’t know who Duchess Goldblatt is: jump in the pool. The water’s warm. Nobody else does, either.
This month sees the publication of “Becoming Duchess Goldblatt,” an anonymously penned memoir chronicling the conception and history of Goldblatt the everyman’s 81-year old therapist, self-help guru, inspirational tweeter, and, as Duchess would have it, “One of the most important voices in American letters.”
The Duchess was born in the wake of the writer’s own painful divorce and series of rather traumatic family events (raising a son as a single parent, losing her father to terminal illness, the disappearance of her troubled older brother). After the divorce, the writer discusses getting onto social media with a friend (we can assume this conversation happened in the mid aughts). “I wouldn’t mind seeing what people are up to,” she told her friend, “as long as they can’t see me.” An online avatar is born: Duchess Goldblatt, illustrated by a 17th-century painting titled “Portrait of an Elderly Lady,” resplendent in an Elizabethan ruff.
The writer goes to great lengths in the book to demarcate herself from the Duchess. Goldblatt is an alter ego, someone onto whom she can project her pain and have it come back in the form of jokes. An obvious model is Dorothy Parker, but in a way the writer’s creative nimbleness and insistence on anonymity brings to mind someone more like Lee Israel. (The reviewer would like to say: I would hope the Duchess takes this as a complement and not a slight, Your Grace.)
“Duchess could say things I would never say,” she writes. Or as she has tweeted, “I’m fictional, but my love is real.” And later “My love is real. I had it tested.”
Her proclamations sound like pithy lines from a standup special — that is, if the comedian was God and if God was an 81-year-old woman from the 17th century. “I’d always thought siblings were about the worst thing you could ever do to a kid.” Or: “Nobody ever gets anything they want in life, Lucy never got to be in the nightclub act, Ethel deserved better than Fred. Sure, Lucy and Ethel got fired from the candy factory but it was a terrible job anyway.”
What’s most astonishing is the relationship Duchess has with her community (upward of 25,000 followers on Twitter at last count). They find her amusing, comforting, assuring. One writes: “You make even the loneliest feel important, thank you.” Indeed, the Duchess replies to every single comment and tweet directed at her. She reads everything, and responds to everything. Her followers are as faithful to her as she is to them.
Another commenter writes: “I was scrolling through your feed, as I sometimes do, looking for comfort. It cheered me up to see the entries for the Duchess Goldblatt Dog show” One can almost picture Duchess Goldblatt as a character in Christopher Guest’s film “Best in Show.” There’s an air of the mockumentary around the entire production.
“I’m the one who knows she’s really making fun of me,” she writes in the memoir, “and it always makes me laugh to myself, even though I’m, technically, the one doing it.” As much as the Duchess and the writer are not the same, a lot of biography and fiction get dropped in a cocktail shaker and poured over Twitter: “For my visit to the Dorothy Parker Academy, I’m trying to choose one of the more joyful Christmas carols about the divorce discovery process.”
Through the course of the memoir the writer, perhaps more than Duchess, learns to be honest about her past and the pain in it: “My father’s memory is a blessing and a balm. When the Duchess is at her best, he’s alive again.” And she admits that part of anonymity is self-preservation: “If people can’t find you, they can’t break your heart.”
Originally used as a tool to deal with her own trauma, over time the Duchess has mutated into something more like a movement. Duchess Goldblatt is a kind of way to rewrite the ways we treat ourselves and the people around us. The writer admits to a very famous friend she meets at one point in the book that the Duchess “whispers” little prayers to each of her followers.
The writer articulates near the end that there must be a holy contract between the reader and the Duchess. She only exists if they believe in her. “Every day of my life I am real and you are fictional. You only exist for me inside my mind. Isn’t that fiction?”
It’s loving the bizarre and cherishing the weird that Goldblatt does best. And it’s why so many people trust her to tell them how to live, how to treat themselves with more compassion, how to treat each other better, too.
“Don’t let anybody shame you for your love of an imaginary friend,” she writes. “Religions have been founded on less.”
Amy Pedulla is a writer and radio producer.
Becoming Duchess Goldblatt
By Anonymous
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 240 pages, $16.59