Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

An anonymous author recounts how, in the aftermath of losing her marriage, career, home, and most of her friendships, she created a fictional social media persona named Duchess Goldblatt, an 81-year-old literary icon whose wit and warmth attracted a devoted online community and gradually helped the author rebuild her life.

The memoir opens with a phone call from Frank Delaney, an Irish writer and BBC journalist the author had met through work. Having perceived the depth of her crisis, Delaney urged her to fill her empty days and told her, "When you have no one to put their arms around you, you must put your arms around yourself" (3). At the time, the author did not know how.

She was working at a publishing house gutted by a foreign acquisition, where roughly 400 colleagues had been let go. Bored one day, she asked her colleague Naomi to help set up an anonymous social media account, since her ongoing divorce prevented a public presence. She named it Duchess Goldblatt, borrowing a friend's childhood dog's name and his mother's maiden name. For the profile image, she chose a 1633 Frans Hals painting, Portrait of an Elderly Lady: a woman in a stiff ruff with a sly, gentle smile. To obscure the account's origins, she seeded Duchess's friend network with people from different cities who were strangers to one another.

The author's life had collapsed in stages. She had modest hopes: to be married, to have a child. When her husband asked for a divorce shortly after they moved into a new house, citing her purchase of a couch as the reason, she was stunned. Friends and family peeled away, some blaming her for letting her life "fall into such a shambles" (7). A psychologist told her she had a pattern of choosing people who would treat her badly, tracing it to her relationship with her mother, who had hated her. The author deflected, crediting her adored father with compensating for everything she lacked.

The memoir provides deep backstory on the author's family. Her mother was deeply cruel; the author believes the night her mother overdosed, she was attempting not only suicide but to abort her pregnancy with the author. Her brother, 10 years older, had debilitating mental illness and an alcohol addiction and did not leave the house for years. Their father loved him unconditionally, modeling the belief that loving others without hope of reward is the greatest challenge humans are given. On his deathbed, the father asked the author to care for the family after he was gone. She refused, knowing it would mean sacrificing her own future. He forgave her. The author also describes her own selective mutism as a child: Until age nine, she could not speak outside the home, a condition she traces to anxiety rooted in these family dynamics.

Duchess's persona crystallized: 81, widowed, a famous author of fictional bestsellers including An Axe to Grind and Not If I Kill You First, with a daughter named Hacienda serving a life sentence in a Mexican prison. Real-life acquaintances showed no interest, but strangers engaged enthusiastically. Duchess responded as a gracious, sometimes imperious celebrity would, always reminding people, "I'm fictional, but my love is real" (19). The author found the arrangement ideal: friendship without the risk of being let down.

The deepest wound was separation from her son. Under joint custody, alternating days and overnights with a four-year-old, the boy wailed at each handoff. The author's attorney dismissed her objections, telling her, "Kids are resilient" (47). Under the weight of accumulated losses, the author's cognitive functioning deteriorated; she lost entire conversations from memory, describing the blank spaces as "little airbags in my mind, cushioning the tender places where the blows and bruises are" (35). She thought about suicide constantly but refused to act because she would never leave her son alone.

The first Duchess account ended when joyless commenters drained the fun; the author sent Duchess over a cliff on a Segway and deactivated the page. About a year later, Naomi mentioned Twitter. Though skeptical of the 140-character limit, the author recognized it as a writing challenge and relaunched Duchess expecting no audience. Novelist Elizabeth McCracken became the first champion, sharing Duchess's lines widely after recognizing her as an ongoing fictional character unfolding in real time. Alone in a dark parking garage elevator, the author saw McCracken's endorsement and felt "the tiniest spark" (30) in her broken heart.

After buying a dilapidated fixer-upper, the author sat on the curb and said aloud, "I can't bear it" (50). A voice came to her, not audible but manifesting as an externally generated thought: "You will bear it. You have to. You will" (50). It was Duchess. From that point, the character became something more than a persona.

Without planning, a community formed. People who found each other through Duchess's posts developed real-life friendships, made T-shirts, and gathered at bookstores. Duchess established the Goldblatt Prize, a fictional literary award given solely at her discretion. Fans sent paintings, handmade dolls, and candy. A diner in Lawrence, Kansas, named a pie after Duchess and shipped slices to the author through a relay of friends.

The pivotal turn in the narrative comes when Lyle Lovett, the singer-songwriter whom the author had admired for over 20 years, began following Duchess on Twitter. She had set Duchess's original hometown as Klein, Texas, a private tribute to Lyle's birthplace. The author drove five hours alone to a concert and met Lyle backstage, bursting into sobs. He did not recognize her until she identified herself as Duchess. Lyle told her that what she was doing was more than fun: She was giving people connection and creating community. He promised to keep her secret. On the drive home, Lyle called at three a.m. to check on her safety. Photographing the sunrise at a truck stop, the author thought that if Lyle considered her worth being friends with, perhaps she was not too tired to go on living.

Their friendship deepened over years. Lyle repeatedly urged the author to write a book, called her "invisible glue made of good will" (201), and compared her community-building to why people go to church.

Throughout, the author describes how Duchess functioned as both creative outlet and therapeutic instrument. A child psychologist coaching her through custody told her she must "be superhuman now" (109): She had to say nothing negative about anyone and find kindness when her heart was brittle. Duchess also reactivated dormant pathways in the author's damaged memory; while the author could not remember basic facts about her own friends, Duchess recalled detailed information about hundreds of followers, as if tapping into parts of the brain the author could no longer access.

The author sold her book and was startled by how many people she wanted to tell: Lyle; her friend and former boss, Chuck; Jackie, a friend from her ex-husband's extended family; her aunt and uncle; Benjamin Dreyer, with whom Duchess had corresponded for years; PJ, a devoted follower in Galveston who had become a genuine friend; Elizabeth McCracken; and many others. She recognized she had rebuilt a civilization from the ashes. She took her wedding rings to a jeweler, had them melted down, and commissioned a new ring from her family's heirloom stones, inscribed "Feasting on the carcasses of my enemies." Her aunt, having read the manuscript, told her something she had resisted hearing: Duchess is not her father. "She's you" (217).

In the memoir's final pages, the author sat down to write Frank Delaney a letter telling him she had learned to put her arms around herself, only to discover he had died months earlier. She addresses her readers instead, delivering the message she could not send Frank: She is okay, her son will be okay, and Duchess is receding as the author's own voice grows stronger. The memoir ends: "Long live Duchess Goldblatt" (221).