BECOMING DUCHESS GOLDBLATT by Anonymous
The anonymous narrator of this memoir has had great losses—her divorce, the death of her beloved father, the suicide of her mentally ill brother, soon her job, but especially stressful, having to share custody of her son. These dramatic events have broken her mentally and emotionally. She has lost the ability to focus, to maintain relationships, and to feel she is a whole, highly functioning person as she had been before losses shattered her life. People around her begin to see cracks.
The narrator cites Lucy and Ethel Mertz as a contrast to her life. She knows Lucy and Ethel will always back each other, but the writer thinks she will be all on her own. But then she has this inspiration of creating a fictional Ethel Mertz—Duchess Goldblatt.
Duchess is essentially a cutting of the narrator planted in the fertile soil of social media and there she thrives by attracting followers with her humor and kindness, qualities the narrator admired in her father, yet never really acknowledged that they were qualities also in her DNA. The cutting grows and finally blossoms into her whole self again. She not only healed herself but shared the beauty with all the followers of Duchess and all the narrator’s real life relationships.
The narrative is a commingling of the narrator’s real life story and Duchess Goldblatt’s created biography interspersed with her random thoughts and bits of wisdom. In the beginning Duchess interrupts with statements that seem fragmented, like the narrator’s fragmentation, yoking disperate levels of thought, slipping from the philosophical to the mundane within a sentence—the juxtaposition often humorous.
Duchess: "I try to keep my abiding love for all humanity in one place, but somehow it always ends up in piles on the dining room table.”
The narrator works in publishing and is a writer. Many of Duchess’ references are about writing. She creates a prize for fiction called the Goldblatt Prize. She gives the prize to real authors like Celeste Ng, Elizabeth McCracken, and the prize is whatever she comes up with, maybe a coffee mug or a pen.
Duchess: "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."
She also creates the Duchess Goldblatt Dog show and then the Cat Show. Followers sent pictures of their pets and Duchess made kind remarks. The contests, including a pie contest, allowed Duchess’ followers to share part of themselves with others and allow Duchess to give encouragement “to do their best creative work, extend forgiveness to others, practice patience. It’s the sort of thing my dad used to tell me to do, come to thing of it.”
The narrator loves Lyle Lovett. She chose Klein, Texas, as Duchess Goldblatt’s birthplace because that is Lovett’s hometown. Lyle begins to follow Duchess and invites her to come to his show. She accepts which allows Lyle to know who Duchess really is. The narrator knows that Lyle will be disappointed with the real Duchess but Lyle sees Duchess in the narrator and values the good she does in creating Duchess, helping with the narrator’s confidence.
Duchess: "Enlightenment is not a state, friends. It’s an unincorporated U.S. territory about the size of Guam. I vacation there some afternoons."
There is a heavy thread of the prodigal son parable. The narrator sees her mentally ill brother as someone who disrupts the family and finds it hard to love him, but her father encourages her to keep working at loving all people, even those that have fallen because they are human beings and worthy. Duchess’ fictional daughter, Hacienda, deserves saving. Hacienda is in a Mexican prison charged with crimes against humanity. The narrator expounds, “you must have known a mother like Duchess at some point…. They have a kid, either grown or still in childhood, and this kid has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He’s malevolent and badly behaves; he doesn’t try to be pleasant. He’s not charming, not funny, not kind or smart or big-hearted or talented, not curious about the world, not a good sport, not fun. And yet the mother, the father, will insist on loud adoration.”
Yet there is a resistance by the narrator to unconditional love. She wonders why the son who stayed home and was good shouldn’t be rewarded.
Duchess: "People often come to me seeking the true meaning of life, but I find they’re usually satisfied with half a sandwich."
Does she wonder whether most humans lack the seriousness or profoundness to quest after life’s deeper questions?
Duchess promoted the good in her followers and in the narrator. Toward the end, Duchess comes bursting through the door of the narrator’s real life. Through Duchess’ goodness and the connections Duchess brings to the narrator, the narrator pieces herself together and becomes a whole and functioning person again.
Duchess: "Crack yourself open 45 degrees at the waist and see if there’s another, smaller you inside. That might be the real one."
By the end of the narrative Duchess and the narrator are one. She knows that she “won’t lose the sounds passing through sudden rightnesses because it was always just me singing my own song to keep myself company.”
The narrator discovers that the grief from her losses has created “an enlarged capacity; the ability to contain heartbreak not my own…. Duchess Goldblatt wasn’t the one who taught me that grief would expand the boundaries of my heart, but she was the one who showed me how to share it….” It is loss, sorrow that shapes character and spurs growth. A person that knows loss, can feel loss in others.
She closes with a very Goldblattian sentiment, closing the circle. “I wish I had learned all my lessons sooner. I’m old already. I don’t know how that happened; I tried so hard to be careful.”
Haven’t we all.
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