A fascinating memoir by a 21st-century original.
How does a fictional character write a real memoir? Very, very well.
Most readers who are active on social media are aware of Duchess Goldblatt, the acerbic yet warmhearted doyenne of Twitter, represented by a Frans Hals portrait of an elderly woman with a stiff muff around her neck. Over the years, she’s dispensed witticisms and advice to her 24,000-plus followers, many of them writers, without giving away any clues about the person behind the persona. When she finally met her No. 1 fan, Lyle Lovett (it’s a long story), he was shocked that she wasn’t "a little old lady or a gay man!” Now, Duchess Goldblatt’s admirers can get to know her still-anonymous creator, and perhaps the biggest surprise in this striking memoir is the fact that Duchess is a name (taken from a friend’s dog), not a title, though no doubt everyone will keep calling her “Your Grace.” The author created Duchess during a terrible time: She'd lost her job, her husband had left her, and she was tormented by the part-time separation from her young son. Duchess was a way for her to lurk online, but she soon found herself carefully crafting posts, responding to everyone who wrote to her, and finding solace in the community she’d created. The book is prismatic, moving among the author’s difficult childhood, the years after her divorce, and her growing relationships with people Duchess had befriended—only a few of whom, including Lovett, have ever met her. She wrestles with the questions of whether she and Duchess are two separate people and how Duchess makes friends so easily when she herself feels almost friendless. Lovett’s manager called what she’s doing “collaborative performance art,” and that’s an apt term for it; together with Duchess’ followers, she’s created a long-term fever dream of humor, compassion, wordplay, and dog photos.
A fascinating memoir by a 21st-century original.Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-21677-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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