Fealty To The Duchess

“Becoming Duchess Goldblatt,” by Anonymous, is a joyful read. Duchess is a fictional character in a nonfiction book. She gets her name from a friend’s dog, Duchess, and his mother’s maiden name, Goldblatt.

She lives in Crooked Path, New York, 10 minutes outside of Manhattan and 10 minutes south of the Canadian border. She burst onto Twitter as a fictional 81-year-old author delivering her surreal wisdoms.

Physically, Duchess resembles the portrait on the cover of the book “Portrait of an Elderly Lady” by Frans Hals, 1633. With her pink, perky cheeks and sly smile, she wears her elaborate linen ruff collar with aplomb.

Fans wear coffee filters around their necks to simulate the starched ruff in her portrait. They tweet pictures of themselves to pledge their fealty to Duchess.

The real person who created Duchess is a writer. The book is fiction, because Duchess is fiction, but it is also memoir, because Anonymous uses Duchess to work through the author’s grief at the death of her father, unresolved issues with a troubled brother, the dissolution of her marriage, and the shared custody of her son.

The Washington Post says, “Through her moonlighting as Duchess, the author becomes more productive at her day job as a nonfiction writer.”

She gets better at life. She tells a friend, “I think somehow Duchess is making me smarter.”

Duchess is like a beloved aunt who shares her life lessons without ever judging.

From her book is a tweet that appeals to me as a writer:

I must have slept funny. My backstory is killing me.

And another piece of good writing advice:

When I edit, I remove the words that I don’t want to be there, hand wash them in warm water, and lay them flat to dry. I might use them later.

As if she is washing them in Woolite®.

Nora Ephron once said, “Never throw anything away. Especially words.”

As a good housekeeper, I use leftover pasta, meatloaf … and words.

I enjoy Duchess’s poetry:

Sometimes I tie your words with a little lavender and mint and use them as a poultice for my weary old heart.

Why not? A lot of plants are the basis for modern drugs. Digitalis comes from foxglove, aspirin comes from willow bark, and dandelion is a natural diuretic. Why not lavender and mint as a balm for a weary heart?

Duchess on coddling:

Some of you have been coddled too long. I’m not cutting the crusts off these sentences for you anymore.

When I was in elementary school, I went to my Aunt Helen’s for lunch every day. She used to cut the crusts from the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches she made for my cousin Johnny and me. She offered a daily menu that also included bologna and cheese, egg salad, or BLT. I was coddled.

You might have to make a cozy home inside your heart one day, and when you do, you’ll be glad you didn’t skimp on the butter and cheese.

Kerrygold Irish butter is best. I use cream to thin a sauce. I also use heavy cream to whip into Rocky Mountain High drifts of white bliss to go with my plum torte. I use my sterling silver flatware every day and don’t save it for best.

Anonymous, author of Duchess, is a Lyle Lovett fan. Their mutual platonic love is based on Lovett’s respect and admiration for Anonymous’s words and craft. Lovett falls for Duchess artistically, not romantically.

Anonymous gets invited to a Lovett concert and meets him in person. Lyle Lovett, with his architecturally structured hair, is enamored by Duchess’s tweets. He says, “It’s that universal love you foster … the community you’re creating … You’re like Jesus that way.”

He suggests Anonymous write a book, which she does.

Duchess is also friends with Benjamin Dreyer, who wrote “Dreyer’s English.” Among the six pages of acknowledgments at the end of his book, he writes, “For her boundless love, compassion, generosity of spirit, and wit, I continue to pledge my fealty to Her Grace Duchess Goldblatt. One could not ask for a truer fictitious friend.”

This is Dreyer, vice president, executive managing editor and copy chief of Random House! Not a whimsical guy but a wordsmith, a word lover. A fan.

In his book “Dreyer’s English,” he illustrates the use of sentence fragments by quoting the opening of “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens: two full paragraphs of sentence fragments. In a section on spelling, he lists “flaccid” and its pronunciation; you may pronounce it either “flaksid” (the original pronunciation) or “flassid” (the more recent, and now more popular, pronunciation). In any event, two C’s.

I prefer the “flassid” pronunciation. I see undulating loose flesh of the upper arms wobble.

Back to Duchess.

From a January 28 tweet, Goldblatt says:

Some people still prefer to make their own ex-husbands at home from scratch, but frankly it’s expensive, labor intensive, thankless work with zero quality control.

I don’t have any ex-husbands, but if I did, I would prefer to make them from scratch, like a Victorian sponge cake.

Another Duchess tweet:

I think I got a bad batch of coffee. If the beans were depressed at the time of harvest, the emotional memory carries on.

Can coffee beans have emotional memory? Of course, if Duchess says so.

I might have to go online and buy myself a mug with the reproduction of the Frans Hals portrait of Duchess Goldblatt. I already pledge her my fealty.