The writer behind the persona insists that Duchess tweets aren’t pre-written. Instead, Duchess’s voice occupies a special place in her brain. “She’s always with me,” the writer said. “She’s with me in the way that ghosts are with us, you know? That the dead are with us. She’s just always sort of present at my elbow. Or on my shoulder. And so sometimes, when I’m not really paying attention, I’ll just randomly go to my phone and, out of habit, click open Twitter and just be Duchess for a minute.” She likens her followers’ responses to “an ongoing cocktail party” or “salon experience.”
But while Lovett suggested she write about her community, “Becoming Duchess Goldblatt” recontextualizes the Twitter account as a therapeutic exercise. The memoir gets dark, covering loss, grief and loneliness. The Duchess-created holiday Secular Pie Thursday, for example, was the result of a Thanksgiving spent alone.
Smith-Cameron said she was “struck by the book as an entity, because the character of Anonymous has such a different voice. Now I kind of read another echo into the tweets.”
Jon Danziger, a film studies professor at Pace University and a longtime Duchess fan, has twice nominated the imagined writer for an honorary degree at Pace. “Her being fictional shouldn’t prevent her from getting a degree,” he said. “There was a moment where I thought, ‘This is the last thing I’m going to do, they’re going to terminate me from the faculty.’ But I thought, ‘If that’s how I’m going out, I’ll take it.’” (“Duchess and I are both quite bitter that she hasn’t been recognized by academia,” her creator said.)
Like most internet personalities, Duchess Goldblatt has her superfans, too. Her home office is filled with fan art, mailed to her through various proxies. She’s received watercolor portraits, maps of Crooked Path and custom-made Duchess MM’s. A woman named P.J. in Galveston, Tex., traveled the world taking selfies with a laminated cutout of Duchess’s face, and mailed her a sachertorte from Vienna. The novelist Ng crocheted a Duchess doll, which she mailed to Lippman to commemorate Lippman’s Goldblatt Prize, an imaginary literary award that Ng had won two years prior.
If 2020 had gone as planned, Meg Heriford, owner of the Ladybird Diner in Lawrence, Kan., would be on a plane right now, hand-delivering a dozen Duchess pies from her restaurant to the now-canceled book party in New York. (Duchess was planning to be represented at the party by some of her notable fans as surrogates.) “There are books to sell,” Heriford said over the phone in February. “I am dead serious, I will bring pies.”
Some publishers were wary of releasing “Becoming Duchess Goldblatt” anonymously, with publicity and marketing departments especially concerned about how they could best promote the book without an author to send out behind it. For Lucy Carson, the writer’s agent, the anonymity is part of the magic. “In publishing, in 2020, there’s such an emphasis on the writer being part of the narrative, and we’re losing something really pure about how to read a text,” she said. “For me, part of the book’s power comes from Duchess saying, ‘You don’t have any choice but to use the text alone to form your opinion.’”
As for the woman depicted in Frans Hals’s painting, the writer behind Duchess hopes she would be pleased that “almost 400 years later, people are still gazing at her portrait with love and affection.”
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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/books/becoming-duchess-goldblatt-memoir.html
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