Becoming Duchess Goldblatt

So now I'm determined to finish my 2021 book list, and that includes finishing some of the half-baked book notes that I wrote and abandoned last year. I actually read this book last summer. 

*****

“Would you call yourself an idiot savant?” That is the question that a friend asks the woman we know only as Duchess Goldblatt, a made-up Internet character and the nom de plume of the anonymous author of Becoming Duchess Goldblatt,  a sort-of memoir. 

I found the Duchess on the Twitter, where she is a very popular presence. A Twitter friend, whom I also have met in real life, liked enough of the Duchess's tweets that they started appearing in my timeline, and so I followed her too. I commented occasionally, and she liked some of my comments, and even responded occasionally. After following her on Twitter for a bit, I liked the Duchess enough that I decided to buy her book, even though I don't usually like books based on popular blogs or Twitter accounts. There’s an ephemeral quality in the writing of an author who is not subject to contracts and professional editing and sales quotas that sometimes does not come across when a publisher attempts to translate that quality into book form. One of those things is not like the other. All of that is to say that I had low expectations for Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, despite rave reviews on (where else) Twitter. 

I liked Becoming Duchess Goldblatt, despite my usual skepticism about books that arise from social media success. I liked it, but I didn’t love it with the passionate intensity that many of the Duchess’s other followers do. Maybe that’s me, or maybe that’s them. Sometimes, social media hysteria for or against a person or phenomenon causes people to amplify their normal response  so that liking or disliking a thing or a person becomes loving or hating that person or thing beyond all reason. Twitter is a madhouse, man. 

What did I like about this book? I liked this line: “It’s possible, in hindsight, that I’ve never understood anything.” Nora Ephron once wrote something about having realized at age 50 or so that she understood nothing. That is ridiculous in that particular case, of course, because Nora Ephron understood pretty much everything. But I’m finding that this is a universal experience for people of my age, mid 50s, who go to work and manage our lives and our families with relative aplomb, thinking most of the time that we know how to operate in the world, how to drive our cars and pay our bills and love people and be human but every so often, we are brought up short and we realize that we know absolutely nothing, or close to nothing. 

Here’s another line that I liked: “Any asshole can make a mean joke. It’s harder work to reach out further for the joke that’s funny and can’t hurt anybody.” Oh yes it one hundred percent is. I’m not good at that many things, but I am good at the quick and deadly comeback, and it’s a very hard thing to know that you should generally avoid doing a thing that you are very good at doing. It’s always a struggle, when I think of the perfect thing to say to the person who in my mind deserves to hear it, to keep it to myself. 

The Duchess writes that people “...have a responsibility to extend themselves on the side of righteousness and do their best work…” This also resonated with me, especially because I don’t really know what my work is right now. My job changed last year and morphed into another kind of job altogether, and this reminded me that it’s better to try to do my best work in this semi-new role, and to use it as an opportunity to learn and contribute something new, than to resist it and complain to myself that my new responsibilities do not align with my skill set or my interests, even though this is true. My skill set could do with some expansion, and I can make myself interested in almost anything, even project management. And I always try, with mixed success to “extend myself on the side of righteousness.” 

That's what I liked about Becoming Duchess Goldblatt. And there's nothing that I really disliked about it, so consider these comments nothing more than slightly critical observations. First of all, there are a lot of contradictions. Is the person behind the Duchess lonely and friendless or is she the center of a huge circle of friends? Is she brilliant or scatterbrained? Is she an obscure journalist or a well-known author? But contradictions are not necessarily bad. To be human is to be contradictory.  No one is either/or. We all contain multitudes of multitudes. 

If I have any real criticism, it’s the celebrity mentions and conversations, which were a little bit odd to me. I found it charming that Duchess met and became friends with her beloved Lyle Lovett, but I felt like an intruder reading transcripts of their text messages and email exchanges. Likewise her exchanges with Elizabeth McCracken, an author I’d never heard of until I read this book. Apparently, I am missing quite a bit, and I’ve added McCracken to my long reading list. Anyway, the Lyle Lovett parts were a bit cloying. Lyle obviously thinks the world of Duchess and her alter ego, and his praise of her goodness and her beauty and her bringing-the-light-into-the-darkness-of-the-world social media mission reads a little bit like “hey, I didn’t say it, HE said it; I’m just repeating the testimony of one of my many satisfied customers.” A tiny bit boastful, is what I mean. 

All in all, these are small gripes. I liked this book very much. I like the idea of imagining an ideal self and then becoming that self. I don’t know who Duchess Goldblatt is in real life, but as far as I am concerned, she is actually Duchess Goldblatt. She imagined the person she wanted to be, and she became her. Well done, Duchess