Becoming Duchess Goldblatt" is a captivating memoir by Anonymous that delves into the life and persona of the enigmatic Duchess Goldblatt. Readers are dropped into her whimsical world, exploring themes of identity, resilience, and the power of connection. With a perfect blend of humor and introspection, this book resonates with anyone who has experienced loneliness or the search for belonging. It celebrates the transformative nature of social media and the profound impact of literature on our lives. A fun read for those seeking heartfelt insights and genuine connections. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC, all opinions are my own.

I wasn't a diehard Duchess Goldblatt fan--until I picked up this book. Reading her story was a beautiful, funny, moving experience, and has made me a follower of Her Grace's. I recommend this to anyone who likes a gorgeous story written in delectable language, and whether you prefer fiction or nonfiction won't matter. The duchess's story is filled with both in just the right mixture. Duchess fan for life now!

Any follower of Duchess Goldblatt on Twitter (and there are many, trust me) is sure to enjoy this "autobiography" of the Duchess. Started under a pseudonym, an anonymous female started the Duchess Goldblatt Twitter handle to offset her depression after the breakup of her marriage. From that small action, an online legend was born, and it continues today with the Duchess holding court on Twitter and gaining thousands of followers, even those among the rich and famous.

I hadn't heard of Duchess Goldblatt, social media persona, before seeing this book. I was intrigued by it being written by Anonymous. "I bet I can figure out who Anonymous is," I thought. "I have Columbo-level Internet sleuthing skills." I opened the digital copy to find these words at the very beginning:
"This is a work of nonfiction.
"Some names and identifying details have been changed.

"Quit hounding me, children.
"You don’t need to know everything."

Touche. Maybe I won't unmask Anonymous. But it was a quick, often poignant read. I wasn't expecting to relate to her so much, professionally or personally. But that's the magic of both books and the internet, that we discover how much we have in common with other humans.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

Wise, poignant, and very funny. No one has a voice quite like the anonymous author who has assumed the mask of the beloved Duchess Goldblatt.

This is kind of a book within a book, an author within an author. The author of "Becoming" is actually anonymous. She tells about her own life and the very rough times that persuaded her to create a character on Twitter who speaks her mind fearlessly and with enormous wit about the state of the world and situations of those who tweet. Her style reminds me of the Algonquin Table wits...and how wonderful to have their spirits back again!

The history of character, and how we shape it
“Portrait of an Elderly Lady” by Frans Hals, 1633, the Twitter profile photo of Duchess Goldblatt
Heraclitus proclaimed that character is destiny, but does “character” have a destiny of its own? In her wide-ranging cultural history of the term, Marjorie Garber wonders if it is merely “a quaint survival from a more naïve, more ethical, or at least less brazen past”.

Yet this noted Shakespeare scholar demonstrates that the term remains a prominent point of reference today. From the Classical period on, character was understood as the pith of human identity, a set of essential traits expressing not just abilities but moral compass. This idea has been widely questioned in the West since the late nineteenth century, but character talk continues to thrive, at times through related words such as “personality” and “temperament”. Garber finds that the concept of a “core” character is also invoked implicitly today. The popular apology “This is not who I am” suggests an enduring self from which the person has deviated.

Ironically, character as an idea lacks any determinate essence, which is why it has persisted over time in different guises. The word derives from the Greek χαράσσειν, to engrave, traits being seen as deeply etched into one’s being. Garber shows, however, that the term was always less stable than that etymology suggests. Classical writers allowed that character traits could be forged through habitual practice, and guidebooks illustrating character types and role models have been popular ever since. These include Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans and Emily Post’s Etiquette, as well as related “character education” programmes, such as the Boy Scouts. (The movement’s founder, Robert Baden-Powell, preferred this punchy name to “Society for the Propagation of Moral Attributes”.) Garber demonstrates that the concept of character has always been riven between being inborn on the one hand, and culturally acquired on the other. This duality led to various unresolved issues. If character consisted of essential traits, how were they to be identified and measured? If socially constructed, how were they to be sanctioned and challenged?

Garber approaches these questions thematically for much of her overview. Her topics include the idea of character in politics (she seizes on President Trump’s invocation in 2017 of “National Character Counts Week” as an example of how the term has become debased in recent years, although his flagrant hypocrisy also gave substance to Joe Biden’s election slogan in 2020, “Character is on the ballot”). She writes about character’s gendered dimensions (with masculinity, not surprisingly, being normative: a “bold” man is deemed brave, whereas a “bold” woman may be deemed shameless); and the question of “national character” (a perennial topic since antiquity, and one that Garber finds accentuated during periods of national crisis: “Sometimes it is a regressive move, and sometimes a call to remember our better selves”). She also writes about efforts to represent character scientifically, including not only the sober statistics of social scientists but also the extravagant fancies of phrenologists, who read character traits such as “Amativeness” and “Philoprogenitiveness” in the contours of a person’s cranium. She has perceptive things to say, too, about how character has been shaped by the example of literary characters – especially those of Shakespeare, who provided “the blueprint … that taught us how to be us”.

Garber has unearthed fascinating material and is a convivial, stimulating critic. At times, however, her thematic arguments can become diffused amid a fog of examples and lengthy quotations that cry out to be paraphrased. Her narrative becomes more cohesive when she discusses the rise and apparent fall of character since the nineteenth century. Garber focuses on Britain and North America, where the concept reached its apogee during the mid- nineteenth century. It provided a useful replacement for the “soul” in a secularizing age, although for many it continued to have religious and moral implications. Character formation also became the primary aim of the English public schools, supplanting scholarship, yet its centrality was not restricted to the elite: popular works such as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859) presented good character as an egalitarian passport to social advancement.

John Stuart Mill’s insistence in the mid-nineteenth century that individuals fashion their characters, rather than passively succumbing to external pressures and inward predispositions, indirectly encouraged more idiosyncratic expressions of character. Garber neglects the late nineteenth-century aesthetic turn – an important development – that contributed to “character” being eclipsed by “personality”. By the end of the century, philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde (neither mentioned by Garber) went well beyond Mill by advocating perpetual self-creation, even at the expense of public morality. Because “character” still connoted a relatively fixed and moral centre, “personality” became the preferred way to capture this aesthetic understanding of the self. Stemming from the Latin “persona”, meaning “mask”, personality accorded with the new theatrical presentation of the self, often upstaging character during the fin de siècle.

Twentieth-century social scientists also preferred personality as a term, not for its exhibitionist connotations but for its value neutrality. As Garber shows, psychologists offered “personality traits” as objective replacements for the moralistic “character types” common in western literature. “Extraversion”, “Openness” and “Neuroticism” suited a scientific age better than “The Grumbler”, “The Gossip” and “The Coward”. She observes that the widespread acceptance of “personality disorder” in popular discourse further sidelined the term character, as did the rise of celebrity “personalities” as cultural heroes.

Garber focuses on the role literary creations have played as exemplars; while acknowledging the social dimensions of character construction, she preserves the distinction between human character and fictional characters. Yet today, many consciously view their own character to be fictional to greater or lesser extents, and construe their lives in narrative terms, reflecting the broad shift in Western culture from metaphysics to metafictions.

This practice first assumed momentum in the late nineteenth century. While Wilde is often cited as the poster boy for self-invention, there were numerous others who exceeded him in their zeal to become fictional. Alfred Jarry, for example, emulated his grotesque character Père Ubu, at times losing himself in the role entirely by speaking in a staccato voice and referring to himself in the third person. At the same time, Frederick Rolfe (aka “Baron Corvo”) aspired to become a priest and acclaimed artist. When neither dream came true, he weathered his disappointment by living audaciously as if they had. (He signed his letters “Fr. Rolfe”, which conveniently signalled “Father” as well as “Frederick”.) He also revised his real life to his liking by writing brilliant – and frequently libellous – romans-à-clef. In his masterpiece Hadrian the Seventh (1904), he made himself Pope, cheerfully excommunicating others who were thinly disguised enemies from his real life.

Rolfe’s example casts in relief some of the problems and possibilities that come with living as a fictional character. He is likely to have been a sociopath, engaging in fraud and self-deception. Yet his fictionalizing was not solely pathological: it permitted him to reframe his setbacks and remain open to new opportunities, not all of them criminal. His endless reinvention enabled him to write brilliant works under adverse conditions until his death.

Becoming fictional also empowered the novelist Helen Emily Woods. In 1938 she changed her name to “Anna Kavan”, the name of a fictional character from two of her previous novels. She changed the cut and colour of her hair too, but the most profound transformation was to be found in the style and content of her fiction. Anna Kavan’s works were boldly experimental, expressing a hidden store of creativity that the capable Helen Woods only suggested. Alice Sheldon (1915–87), a part-time writer, likewise experienced a surge of inspiration when she secretly adopted the pen name and persona of “James Tiptree, Jr.”, but when Tiptree was publicly exposed as Sheldon, her muse largely disappeared along with the enabling character she had created.

Many others have openly fictionalized their lives to some extent since the advent of the internet. Curating one’s character online is commonplace, and “story” has become a master metaphor for how people interpret their experience. This fictionalist moment has demonstrable dangers, including the spread of misinformation and scepticism towards science, expertise and well-established facts. Yet there are distinct benefits. To assess the potential gains and pitfalls, we can learn from those who have tried it – among them the author of Becoming Duchess Goldblatt.

“Duchess Goldblatt” is a popular figure on Twitter, one of the few to openly proclaim her fictional status and age (eighty-one). She is a famous author, having written a family chronicle, “An Axe to Grind”; an account of mother–daughter relations, “Not if I Kill You First”; and the unclassifiable “Feasting on the Carcasses of My Enemies: A love story”. The hint of anger in these titles may reflect the agonized state of mind her creator was in when she conceived of the Duchess. She relates in this book that she had recently undergone a painful divorce, resulting in her being abandoned by in-laws and many so-called friends; in short order she also lost her job and her home. Now a single parent living in uncongenial surroundings, she created the Duchess on social media to distract herself from desolation. It was sufficient that the Duchess amused her, and she was surprised to find that the Duchess appealed to strangers as well.

This was partly due to the Duchess’s surreal sense of humour. She had a knack for creating incongruous juxtapositions that stood out from ordinary Twitter fare: “I spilled a bag of ellipses all over the floor. Now I don’t know where anything begins or ends”. And she provided unique perspectives on being fictional: “People often ask me what fictional people see in their dreams. We dream of you”.

The Duchess also became a secular saint. Empathizing with correspondents who were lonely or in pain, Anonymous had the Duchess extend solace. Anonymous assumed that she was simply channelling her father, a seminarian who preached unconditional love. She found this difficult to practise, but the Duchess exuded compassion. “Fictional or not,” wrote one acolyte, “you are a beacon of kindness.” Another described the Duchess in religious terms, praising “her faith, her words, her friendship, her insistence I not surrender – she had made a miracle”. Fans created Duchess reliquaries, or at least tchotchkes, and met each other in person, united by their devotion. The Duchess didn’t take herself too seriously, although she was happy to advise, “Don’t let anyone shame you for your love of an imaginary friend. Religions have been founded on less”.

The Duchess’s public profile expanded when writers and celebrities, themselves adherents of artifice, accepted the rare opportunity to chat with someone fictional. When the singer Lyle Lovett joined the conversation, the Duchess revealed her real identity to him, confessing that he was one of her idols, and they soon became friends. She credits him for helping her to regain her self-confidence, which also came from the virtual community she established via the Duchess. Included here are some of her exchanges with Lovett, which should reassure those wondering if this entire account might be fictional. As a work of non-fiction, Becoming Duchess Goldblatt belongs under Autobiography if not Duobiography, but it also aspires to be a self-help book. The tone can shift from sharp cynicism to treacly sentimentalism; like all of us, Anonymous is complicated.

Anonymous not only regained companions and self-esteem: her own character merged with that of her creation. The Duchess would console and bolster her at stressful moments. At her lowest ebb, Anonymous had trouble concentrating and remembering, yet she focused with ease on composing the Duchess’s tweets and recalled minute details about the Duchess’s many correspondents. She attributes her gradual recovery to the existence of her fictional persona. Anonymous landed a good job that involved distilling information and encouraging clients – skills she had honed as amanuensis to the Duchess. She also became more assertive. She recalled being timorous during a job presentation, when suddenly “Duchess came flouncing through the door … and pushed me aside. She grabbed the mic”.

Anonymous appears possessed by the Duchess. By the end of her memoir, though, she realizes that it was actually self-possession. Her epiphany arrived via a relative who had read an early draft of her book, and insisted that she was wrong to attribute the Duchess’s admirable character traits to the saintly father. “It’s your voice. It’s your ideas and your humor. … You give him all the credit for Duchess … but honey, she’s you.”By merging with her fictional character, Anonymous discovers the character that she always had, and finds the life she was meant to live. She attained integrity – a trait associated with undeviating character – by becoming a fiction.

Michael Saler is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is writing a history of the interplay between reason and imagination in modernity

Very difficult to follow if you aren’t intimately acquainted with the Twitter account the book stems from. I had a very hard time slogging through this one, and can’t recommend it in good faith. A Twitter aficionado familiar with the original account may feel different.

Equal parts funny and poignant. I found this Twitter account through another author. I was fascinated by the backstory behind it and how it became such a sensation. Very well written.

Thank you to Houghton Miffin Harcourt, Netgalley and the wonderful author for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I am late to this party but so glad I came. I know nothing about Twitter or much about social media and I had heard that this book was written by someone who took the Twitter universe by storm. Perhaps that's why I put off reading it for so long. I wondered what I would gain from reading it and told myself it probably wouldn't be my sort of book. I am happy to say I was completely wrong. This book is for everyone, particularly those who have experienced sorrow, their place in an unrecognisable world and seemingly insurmountable challenges.
This is the last book I will finish in 2020 and exactly the book I needed to read to complete this crazy year. By revealing their own vulnerabilities and boundless strength, Duchess and the author inspired me to awaken to my own. I fell off my chair laughing and I went through a whole box of tissue blubbering.
I'm still not on Twitter though ;-)

This book will be hard to understand for anyone who is not familiar with the Duchess Goldblatt phenomenon on Twitter. I listened to the audiobook but did not finish it, as it felt redundant.

I'm not a Twitter person, so I only kind of knew about Duchess Goldblatt before picking up this book. I read it on a whim and am so very glad I did. This book is about a woman who creates a social media alter ego, but it's also about overcoming trauma. Duchess Goldblatt is an 81 year old best selling author who offers encouragement and kindness to her Twitter followers, as well as witty little comments and peeks into her fantastical life. The author dreamt up Duchess in part as a way to fill her time while her son was with her terrible ex. As the book begins, she's lost everything - her marriage, her family, her friends, her job, her house - and is grief-stricken and despairing. She also had a really traumatic childhood, which she only offers glimpses of, but it was clearly awful. She seems to think that Duchess is a reflection of her beloved father, but as the book goes on we can see that Duchess is all the author. So many people have left her that she doesn't like to let people get close, so using Duchess she can connect to people without any fear - they can't leave her because they don't actually know her. But Duchess starts to help her open up (she even develops an endearing relationship with Lyle Lovett). This book is beautifully written, it's devastating and funny at the same time, and the author is just so lovely - highly recommended, whether you're a Twitter user or not.

https://www.austin360.com/entertainmentlife/20200717/lsquoi-avert-my-gaze-from-uglinessrsquo-audience-with-duchess-goldblatt

Review published in Open Letters Review:

Into a site full of division and alienation walks an octogenarian with a porn star name, a starched ruff, and a sly twinkle in her eye. Duchess Goldblatt, a fictional persona whose name is the name of a childhood pet mixed with a mother’s maiden name, has made it big on Twitter. For her social media avatar, “Her Grace” uses a 1633 Dutch portrait of an elderly woman with an expression as inscrutable as the Mona Lisa. Her wisdom, “made of spun sugar and justice,” is dispensed to thousands of Twitter followers who love the character’s combination radical acceptance, unconditional love, and sometimes-sharp humor. “Hopes and dreams need air,” she tweets. “Cracking a window in the car an inch and leaving them behind while you run errands will not work. They could die.”

Review ontinued at: https://openlettersreview.com/posts/becoming-duchess-goldblatt-a-memoir-by-anonymous

As a non-twitter user, I was unaware that the fiction character of Duchess Goldblatt had been an actual social media phenomenon. The author offers readers interesting musings, a celebrity friendship and a glimpse into who is behind this fictional character. It would be best for fans of Duchess Goldblatt on twitter-it will fall short for others.

I am not a member of the Twitterati, and so had never come across the online persona of Duchess Goldblatt before. Duchess is a fictional character who dispenses words of wisdom, along with acid humour, to a wide following, including several leading writers and musicians.

The writer behind Duchess has always maintained strict anonymity, and she continues to do so in this memoir. It's a very affecting story, describing how she took refuge in this anonymous persona to deal with the aftermath of a failed marriage and the loss of her son to her ex-husband and his family. As she goes deeper into her past, you can see that she had a very difficult childhood and has not fared too well in her adult life either.

The idea of Duchess was largely just to be able to post on Twitter without being identifiable, but Anonymous did not anticipate that her creation would become a cult hero, and that a community of like-minded people would grow around her creation, and begin to form new friendships quite independently of her. After a long time wondering if she had any friends at all, she now found that she had a host of friends, but she could not reveal herself to them.

This book is a quirky and ironic memoir of a unique woman who will hopefully reveal herself one day, as she deserves to be given great credit as the empathetic, witty, succinct and pithy writer that she is.

This is a soul-bearing memoir by a lonely person who has undergone trauma piled on trauma. You could say that the fictional Duchess Goldblatt is nothing more than a glorious coping mechanism. But that would be underestimating and undervaluing the connecting social bridge that Her Grace has become. DG is sweet and funny, charming and wistful. To dismiss her as a fictional character is to sell short the real humanity she displays. I loved this memoir, which is two stories braided from the strands of the anonymous author's real life and the inspiration for, backstory of, and history thus far of @DuchessBlatt. I loved it. Especially right now. I would highly recommend the audio version. The narrators (including the IRL Lyle Lovett) do it and Her Grace proud.

[Thanks to Netgalley for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest opinion. I alternately read the ARC and listened to the Audible version, which I purchased.]

The realest autobiography of a fictional character that you will ever read. Duchess Goldblatt, a psuedonymous Twitter character, is vaguely dark but deeply kind, delightfully fanciful but well grounded (aided no doubt by the sizable ruff she wears). She has become a daily light, an anti-troll, to tens of thousands of devoted Twitter followers.This is the story behind the account: a tale of a lonely, grieving mother dealing with a legacy of emotional trauma who finds some healing and community by giving voice to an 81-year-old cultural icon that springs fully formed from her head.

It is witty and poignant and vulnerable. The narrative is punctuated with sparkly bon mots from her Twitter feed, charming private conversations with her follower-friends, and endearing encounters with Lyle Lovett. If that's not enough to entice you, then Duchess shame you.

Content notes: emotional trauma, childhood emotional trauma, parental neglect, parental death, peripheral character with addiction and suicidal thoughts, painful divorce

Anonymous uses a quote from Bill Clegg in his Did You Ever Have A Family to paint a picture of her life. “She was...an untouchable. Not from scorn or fear, but from the obscenity of the loss.” In a matter of a few years, she lost her father, marriage, job, friends. She created the Duchess to have a way to communicate without revealing her real self. She uses the Duchess to create a community. “So, to me, it didn’t look like people were gathering around the Duchess; it looked to me like we had all wandered into the same neighborhood bar and were standing elbow to elbow.
Duchess is Anonymous’ father reborn. A religious man, he believed in finding the good in everyone. She displays a sweet humor, an uplifting positivity that he would be proud of. I admire Anonymous for rising above her challenges and channeling the good nature of her father. “Duchess, who saw the spark of the divine in each person. My heart was brittle and broken, but Duchess stepped forward and put words of kindness and beauty in my mouth.” It’s a very uplifting message. “I’ve built myself a civilization from the ashes.”
Now, the book is disjointed and not a typical memoir. It’s more a stream of consciousness rhapsody of thoughts. If DG speaks in 144 character tweets, this book takes the idea and expounds it. This probably works best if you’re already. DG fan. I “knew of her” but can’t describe myself as a fan. I went into this more out of curiosity.
My thanks to netgalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for an advance copy of this book.

Magnificent. What else can I say? She's captured the magic of her social media presence in book form -- something incredibly difficult to do. But I'm not surprised: it is the Duchess, after all.