The painting of a 17th-century Dutch aristocrat hangs in the west wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She wears a ruff collar, lace cuffs and a velvet-trimmed brocade jacket with puffed sleeves â the height of Calvinist chic. Painted by Frans Hals in 1633, the subjectâs name has been lost to history; the piece is called âPortrait of an Elderly Lady.â
But on Twitter, this portrait is the avatar that represents Duchess Goldblatt, the fictional author of nonexistent best sellers like âAn Axe to Grind,â âFeasting on the Carcasses of My Enemies: A Love Storyâ and âNot If I Kill You First,â a tale of motherhood. Her audience of more than 25,000 followers includes many good-humored literary types, including the acclaimed authors Elizabeth McCracken, Celeste Ng, Alexander Chee and Laura Lippman.
Duchess Goldblatt joined Twitter in 2012, and has since built a rich mythology around herself. When sheâs not philosophizing about empathy, toast, dogs and Riesling, sheâs quipping about the mundanities of life in Crooked Path, N.Y., her imaginary duchy, located 10 minutes north of Manhattan and 10 minutes south of the Canadian border. (âThe Scrabble Tile Drive continues in Crooked Path all weekend,â she recently wrote. âOnly clean, like-new consonants accepted.â)
Thereâs no recipe for Duchess Goldblatt tweets, but they often amount to one part conventional wisdom and two parts surrealism, with some grandmotherly tenderness or saltiness sprinkled in for good measure. âNight night, loons,â she tweeted to her followers earlier this year. âDonât try to snuggle up to me in my sleep. You know I need to stretch out.â She often writes about maintaining her sanity: âIâm finding myself some peace and quiet today. I buried it in a coffee can under a weeping willow last fall.â Her feed is one of the few places on the internet devoted to spreading unadulterated joy. Itâs also a successful example of social media literature, due in part to Duchessâs voice, which requires readers to confront the ridiculousness of the entire premise alongside the sincerity of her musings.
Because so many writers and actors follow Duchess Goldblatt, it has long been suspected that her creator is a public figure. (McCracken, the first writer to champion Duchess online, seemed a likely candidate.) The writer behind the account insists thatâs not the case, though she is a professional writer. âThatâs kind of the joke to me, that Duchess is famous as a fictional person, but Iâm not. In any way,â she said during a phone interview.
Still, devoted fans will soon learn a great deal about the person behind the account; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is publishing her memoir, âBecoming Duchess Goldblatt,â on Tuesday.
The people who do know her real identity are a very small number, including a couple of people at Houghton Mifflin and a few select friends made on social media who have gone on to meet her in person. The publisher wouldnât reveal her identity, and other friends said they plan to take the secret to their graves. Tina Jordan, an editor at The Times and a regular Duchess reader, said her efforts to figure out the writer behind the account have so far come up empty.
The memoir maps the characterâs origins as an activity to help the writer distract herself post-divorce. The book is written entirely in the authorâs personal voice, with Duchess tweets interspersed when appropriate. For example, following one scene in which divorce lawyers describe the writerâs joint custody options, we see this Duchess tweet: âWhat kind of feelings taste best raw? I like regrets on the half shell. Serve them on a bed of crushed ice with lemon wedges and Tabasco.â
âIt started on Facebook, just as something fun to do for myself,â she said of the fictional persona. Abandoned by friends and relatives in the wake of her divorce, and faced with nights alone when her 6-year-old son was with his father, she began to sublimate her pain into joy online. Soon, strangers began to play along.
For years, she says, her ex-husband told her she wasnât funny. âHe was very concerned with appearances, and he wanted to appear to be the smarter and kinder and funnier one, and he resented whenever he thought I upstaged him,â she said.
After migrating from Facebook to Twitter, Duchess hit a nerve with the literary community, and caught the attention of her creatorâs favorite singer, Lyle Lovett.
âI just came across a tweet where she mentioned me and I thought, what is this?â Lovett said. He clicked on the entire feed and âreally enjoyed her writing immediately.â At the time, Lovett was on tour, staying in a luxury hotel in Washington, D.C., looking at a portrait not unlike the Frans Hals painting. He sent the writer a direct message, inviting her to a concert of his.
âThe person behind Duchess is every bit as kind and thoughtful and clever as Duchess is herself,â Lovett said. Theyâve become real-life friends in the years since, and he contributed his voice to the audiobook of âBecoming Duchess Goldblatt,â alongside the actress J. Smith-Cameron (âSuccessionâ) and the narrator Gabra Zackman.
Lovett was the first to suggest to Duchess that she write a book. âI told her from the beginning that I thought she had a book because of the community that she createdâ online, he said. Heâs gotten to know some fellow Duchess fans in real life, too, like the Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer, who has visited Lovettâs home in Texas. Some Duchess fans have even attended his concerts in groups. âTo be able to create that kind of community virtually and anonymously, in this day and time, is really something,â Lovett said, especially since the community is bonded by a sensibility more than a specific shared interest.
The writer behind the persona insists that Duchess tweets arenât pre-written. Instead, Duchessâs voice occupies a special place in her brain. âSheâs always with me,â the writer said. âSheâs with me in the way that ghosts are with us, you know? That the dead are with us. Sheâs just always sort of present at my elbow. Or on my shoulder. And so sometimes, when Iâm not really paying attention, Iâll just randomly go to my phone and, out of habit, click open Twitter and just be Duchess for a minute.â She likens her followersâ responses to âan ongoing cocktail partyâ or âsalon experience.â
But while Lovett suggested she write about her community, âBecoming Duchess Goldblattâ 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 âstruck 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.â
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. âHer being fictional shouldnât prevent her from getting a degree,â he said. âThere was a moment where I thought, âThis is the last thing Iâm going to do, theyâre going to terminate me from the faculty.â But I thought, âIf thatâs how Iâm going out, Iâll take it.ââ (âDuchess and I are both quite bitter that she hasnât been recognized by academia,â 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. Sheâs received watercolor portraits, maps of Crooked Path and custom-made Duchess M&Mâs. A woman named P.J. in Galveston, Tex., traveled the world taking selfies with a laminated cutout of Duchessâs face, and mailed her a sachertorte from Vienna. The novelist Ng crocheted a Duchess doll, which she mailed to Lippman to commemorate Lippmanâs 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.) âThere are books to sell,â Heriford said over the phone in February. âI am dead serious, I will bring pies.â
Some publishers were wary of releasing âBecoming Duchess Goldblattâ 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 writerâs agent, the anonymity is part of the magic.
The New York Times