Duchess Goldblatt is a fictitious character, invented for social media. She lives on Twitter, where her kind old eyes (her avatar is a 17th-century Dutch painting called "Portrait of an Elderly Lady") twinkle out at her followers as she dispenses cracked wisdom. ("New Year's Eve, steam the new year in a pot of water with a bay leaf. Any months that don't open on their own are no good. Throw them out.")
The Duchess' creator is anonymous, and that is the biggest problem with the new memoir, "Becoming Duchess Goldblatt." We don't know who the narrator is, which makes it impossible to understand her transformation — or, frankly, to much care.
Here's what we do know: Anonymous is a youngish woman, divorced, with a son. Her upbringing was difficult — her brother was mentally ill, her mother a cold fish, her beloved father dead. Her divorce was devastating, and afterward all of Anonymous' friends abandoned her, though it's not clear why. "It seemed, for a number of years there, that in every direction I turned, doors closed in my face," she writes. "People didn't want me around."
Anonymous invented the Duchess out of a desire to be part of social media without revealing anything of herself. On Twitter, she found a voice, an audience and a tribe; as Duchess Goldblatt, she now has more than 30,000 followers. But only a few people know who she really is.
"Becoming Duchess Goldblatt" is one of the summer's buzzy books — it garnered a starred review in the trade journal Kirkus and was named one of the New York Times' 20 books to read in 2020 — but, frankly, I'm not feeling it.
The bar is and needs to be high for anonymous memoirs — with no names or identifying characteristics, where's the accountability? Is all of this true? Is any of it true?
Anonymity in memoirs is usually to protect the writer in the case of fraught books — "Incest Diary," for instance, or "In His Sights," a woman's memoir of being stalked.
The reason for anonymity here seems entirely frivolous — merely to keep the mystery going.
