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.

What a wonderful, feel-good book that is great for fans of Her Grace or people just wanting positivity in their hands. I have followed Duchess Goldblatt on Twitter for a long time, now, mostly through other accounts I followed who happened to follow her, too. The wit, the tone, the language are all so perfect, and they translated well to the book.

Becoming Duchess Goldblatt tells the story of Anonymous, the author behind the character, interspersed with Duchess' tweets. Anonymous is human, flawed, pained at times. But Duchess is none of those things. She is a world-famous author and legend who invites people into her realm of Crooked Path and offers humor and kindness. I finished this book with a wistful smile on my face.

My thanks to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

It’s a tough world out there for fictional characters. They can be overwritten or underwritten, written in and written out. Their innermost thoughts and desires are, to overwork the poor metaphor, an open book. They can be bended, folded, spindled and mutilated --- and sent out in the sequel to do it all over again.

Fictional characters are, above all, the lawful prey of the author, who is routinely admonished to chase them up trees and throw stones at them. Writers are allowed to do things to fictional characters that would send them to the penitentiary in any other context --- and they get paid for the privilege. Further down the food chain, fictional characters are subject to the rough ministrations of the critics, who are free to misuse, misunderstand or misinterpret them at their leisure, assigning symbolic meaning to them just for fun. And then, of course, there are the readers…and well, you know what they’re like, don’t you.

Duchess Goldblatt, a shining ornament in the vast open sewer of social media, would be the first to tell you that she is a fictional character and heir to their inherent maladies. Although social media is littered with fictional characters --- people pretending to be Batman or Darth Vader or what have you --- Duchess Goldblatt is a social media native, not a refugee from some other format.

As such, the Duchess (she prefers to be addressed as “Your Grace” but doesn’t insist on it) has two attributes that fictional characters usually don't have. First, Duchess Goldblatt is conceptual, which is a function of her medium; 140 characters of absurdist humor sliding by on a shining screen is conceptual to a degree that would make Marcel Duchamp drop his cigar with envy. Second, Duchess Goldblatt is communitarian, which, again, is very suitable to the medium. The Duchess’s fan base is highly inclusive and highly exclusive. Inclusive, in that she will talk to anyone (and will encourage them, which is a rare gift). And exclusive, in that the people she talks with include luminaries like singer-songwriter Lyle Lovett, novelist Celeste Ng, copy editor extraordinaire Benjamin Dreyer, and the brilliant and kind Elizabeth McCracken, who was the first author to encourage the Duchess and promote her to a wider world.

Duchess Goldblatt is an exemplar of what social media can be --- more than an exemplar, because the Duchess is a fount of positivity and universal love in a medium that is almost wholly rife with negativity and hatred. BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT is the story of how one anonymous writer, struggling with misery and despair, created a synthetic online personality overflowing with compassion and empathy.

If fictional characters survive and thrive in the world, against all odds, they can develop various secondary issues, ranging from creeping irrelevance to sudden annihilation. One of the most common problems is transplantation --- moving a fictional character from a familiar medium to an unfamiliar one. For example, Dr. Seuss’  THE GRINCH translated brilliantly into animated television, but far less well in a live-action movie flop. Translating Duchess Goldblatt from a short-form Twitter account to a long-form memoir carries certain perils. The reader may wonder if the signature Goldblattian wit would be diluted or diminished, the narrative may not have been compelling, the mystery may have been stripped away.

I am here to testify that anyone who was concerned about the Duchess’s foray into memoir has nothing to fear. It would be convenient, and lazy, to say that BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT is a triumph: marching through the Roman streets, trumpets blaring, crowds screeching, standards held high. But it is something better and purer than a triumph. It is a quiet, intimate story of a broken person in a broken world, pulling a slender purple thread out of the ragged fabric of her life and using it to weave a glorious tapestry.

The theme of brokenness extends, explicitly, to the fragmented structure of the narrative. BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT expertly dovetails the narrative of the formation and growth of the Duchess character with the travails of her creator’s life. The creation process for the Duchess’s tweets is explained as the result of happy inspiration and, alternatively, as the product of careful editing. (Duchess Goldblatt is large and contains multitudes.) The rise of the Duchess as a phenomenon is, gloriously, built on acts of kindness (principally by Lyle Lovett, who is a mensch without peer) that counterbalance the author’s own traumas.

It is this side of the story that uplifts the book, the closely observed trauma, the intricate details of suffering, the short, spare sentences that sum up the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. Although the author’s tribulations are common enough --- and, as she reminds us, are just part of the universal suffering we all share --- they are described so flawlessly that they resonate, dark music in a minor key.

Fictional characters have it easier than the rest of us in one important way. They suffer, as we do, but their suffering always means something and is always important. For living people who have to fight the war of life, suffering all too often is meaningless, just part of the territory. That the anonymous author of BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT transmuted some portion of her burden of pain and loss into a beacon of love and light is little short of alchemy. “Long live Duchess Goldblatt,” the book concludes. So say we all.

I was unfamiliar with the Duchess Goldblatt Twitter account before reading this book, and I am not a big Twitter user in general. This book may be more appealing to the Duchess's fans, but I still enjoyed it as a memoir, though it was a little too scattered for my taste. The author is anonymous, but we learn details about the end of her marriage, her son, her career, and her family background. She is a good writer, and the book has funny and poignant moments, but it is not told in a straightforward way and I was left with many questions about the author's life. I liked the snippets of the Duchess's wisdom throughout the book, and the idea of kindness and how the Duchess connects people. However, I'm not sure there is quite enough material here for a book without knowing more about who the subject is.

Not my type of humor but I can understand why this resonates with people. We get a deep look into the author's life and family issues and Duchess Goldblatt's commentary is sprinkled throughout. The humor is dark but also witty at times.

5★ My new favourite!

“Nobody’s ever read my aura, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably light gray and covered with lint. I’m exhausted most of the time, impatient, distracted, visiting another neighborhood in my head, always with a slow current of sadness underneath. Duchess is white light. She’s fully present. She’s something else entirely.”

She certainly is something else entirely! I was actually reading another fat paperback book but was going to sit outside in the Aussie winter sun (during isolation and all that), so I wanted to hold something easier to read – my Kindle. An hour or so in the sun and a few hours later indoors, there was nothing more to read and I felt like this.

It’s a terrible thing to get old. I lost another lifelong friend today. And yet I’m sure I put her here somewhere.”


There’s been plenty of publicity about this wonderful memoir, so I’ll say only that the author has written about the pain and heartbreak of her real, turbulent, rug-out-from-under-her childhood and married life. She was deeply affected by the bad stuff, but her kindly father also had a strong influence.

While trying to recover from the trauma, she invented 81-year-old Duchess Goldblatt as a social media presence so she could lurk and read and say snarky things with anonymity. But she found she cared about the people she interacted with – and she did interact – so much so that she started tweeting kind things to everyone who contacted her.

She is now one of the Twitterati with followers and fans and friends who rely on her kindness and wisdom. She has doubtless brought not only herself back from the brink of despair but many others who have found a friend in her, although they don’t know who she is.

Someone who does know is her hero, Lyle Lovatt, the singer. (His part of the story is a lot of fun, but I'll leave that for you to discover). When I read about Duchess’s early life, I see a damaged soul who was selectively mute in primary school and who felt worthless. I imagine she was hard to live with and hard for teachers and classmates to understand.

Later, I suspect her husband ran up against the same protective barriers, so he walked out. But they shared joint custody of their little boy, which broke her apart. She and her son are twin souls, very close, practically reading each other’s minds. For them to be separated for days at a time has been torture.

“At the playground: my son, four years old, playing in the sandbox with his pal. He’s digging in the sand with a plastic shovel and reciting a string of numbers, over and over, an incantation. His friend asks him why he always repeats those same numbers over and over.

‘I passcode protected my mom.’ As if it should be obvious.

‘Why?’

‘To keep her safe.’”

That close. Somehow, she has managed to pick up the pieces of her broken self and establish a new persona with the bright shiny ones. The other, darker, duller pieces went back to work, where her memory wasn’t functioning as it used to. She has noticeable gaps, but it’s hard to pinpoint where they are.

“I’ve been told since, by specialists, that this kind of thing can happen. The human mind is kind. It will create blank spaces for itself. I think of them as little airbags in my mind, cushioning the tender places where the blows and bruises are.”

I have a good friend who’s had a couple of bouts of transient global amnesia after a very bad breakup, and I like to think now that her gaps are little airbags rather than losses.

Duchess goes back to work, working with words, in publishing, editing, I’m not exactly sure. She offers professional advice and warnings.

”When I edit, I remove the words that don’t want to be there, hand wash them in warm water, and lay them flat to dry. I might use them later.
. . .
Writers can be a lot of fun at parties, but word to the wise: Keep an eye on your good memories. They’ll strip them down for parts.”
. . .
“Not until people start seeing typos eating out of their garbage cans at night will they regret hunting proofreaders almost to extinction.”


She’s a bit of a loner by nature with very few good ‘real’ friends. Of one of her oldest, she says

“He still travels in some of the social circles I used to be in, with some of the friends I used to have. I don’t think I’m in a circle anymore. I might be in a dotted line now, or just a dot.”

But Duchess Goldblatt is sociable and wise and funny. She is not a duchess, it’s her first name, but her new friends call her Your Grace. She lives in the fictional town of Crooked Path NY, a few miles north of New York City and a few miles south of Canada. So you know it’s fictional. She refers to festivals and events there as if they were real. Her fans have started getting together and creating memorabilia and making friends with each other. She loves them all and keeps them up to date.

I can’t talk now. Vandals have gotten into the Crooked Path town square fountain and siphoned off all the wishes.


The book is full of what I think are some of her tweets – wise, clever sayings – some warm and fuzzy, some funny, all entertaining. In the book they are interspersed here and there and indented on the page. Here are a few. Trust me, there are plenty more!

”A lot of people go very Martha Graham when dancing on their enemies’ graves. Me, I like flamenco. I want the souls of the dead to feel it.
. . .
People often come to me seeking the true meaning of life, but I find they’re usually satisfied with half a sandwich.
. . .
Don’t let anyone shame you for your love of an imaginary friend. Religions have been founded on less.”


If you ever need someone to reign on your parade, this Duchess is your girl. At 81 years old, she is still a girl. Her story is wonderful and so is her creator.

I can’t thank NetGalley and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt enough for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted far too much and will probably continue to quote for some time to come. These are just a few samples. Long live @duchessgoldblatt!

#NetGalley #BecomingDuchessGoldblatt

Memoir is not a genre I delve into often, but when my eye was caught by the cover and title, then my interest peaked by the description of Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, there were only two things I could do: 1. Follow Duchess Goldblatt on Twitter and 2. Get my hands on a copy to read as quickly as possible.

Between the book's description and a month or so of following on Twitter, I was somewhat prepared for it to be a one sitting read but still found myself opening the ebook a bit later in the evening than I should. So I found myself reading across midnight, absorbed in the story of a dysfunctional childhood in her "family of origin," a marriage that ended and the experiences of the author as she goes through love, loss, betrayal, grief, and painful separation from her child. All of which play into the genesis of Duchess Goldblatt, whose 140 character expressions of warmth, humor, and wry wisdom are generously sprinkled about.

Surprisingly, though perhaps it should not have been as the author is a nonfiction writer, the transcription style of the author's conversations and communications, particularly with Lyle Lovett, are what captured my interest. It is through those dialogues that much is examined and revealed. And if you weren't already aware, you are sure to encounter Lyle Lovett's sincerity and charm. 

I am a latecomer to the Duchess Goldblatt community on Twitter, where I am mainly an appreciative lurker. Duchess Goldblatt may have been birthed from the author's needs, but for me she is among a rare few wonderful discoveries that brings some light and comfort in these uncertain times. 

Recommended. It's a memoir. It is lovely, it is sad, and in Duchess it has the warmth, wit, and whimsy of a thousand painted and patinated suns.

This review refers to a digital galley read through NetGalley, courtesy of the publisher, and all thoughts expressed are my own sleep-deprived honest opinions.

Well I really like the premise of this book and I can appreciate that the writer is very talented but the whole package fell short for me.   I generally like books with more of a developed p,it and this was just all over the place it really didn’t hold my attention. Also the anonymous nature is perplexing to me...I see why it was important to the book but in the real world I’m just not sure I get the purpose.