My recommendation for book group was Becoming Duchess Goldblatt.  Usually, I like to recommend something I have read recently, but nothing was a good fit for the group.  I polled a group of friends and Duchess Goldblatt looked interesting and apolitical!

I must admit that when I was a third of the way through the book I was starting to regret my choice (and hoping my friends weren’t silently cursing me).  The author seemed like such an unpleasant person, I had to wonder if she had any friends at all and why was I reading about her unpleasantness.

Reading on my Kindle, I found some empathy around 40 percent in.  The Duchess at one point insists she doesn't have many friends, that if you "get too friendly …they [will] inevitably drop you." But later she admits to a desire to connect with people, that she's "trying to make a new life" for herself. Her “fear” of friendship and the complicated reasons why made the latter part of the book more interesting.

The author, in her persona as Duchess Goldblatt, is active on Twitter.  She uses Twitter to communicate pithy bits of “wisdom” and to build some actual relationships.  I found it interesting that many in the book group saw the book through the lens of social media – how it might be used for good.  As an active user of Twitter for over a decade, I felt it was less about social media and more about a person trying to recover her voice.  I thought the review in the Christian Science Monitor captured the essence of the book well:

“But her story, a kind of reverse Frankenstein, rings true: When her life was in tatters, she created a character out of spare parts of herself and used it to create the community she craved. That lesson can never be heard too often. Like objects in a rearview mirror, the inspiration we seek may be closer than we think.”

Don’t be tempted to just look at her tweets – they often seem disjointed.They play best within the book, in the context from which they came. Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is something between a self-help book, memoir and basic beach read.A good read for when our over-stimulated brains need a rest.

Eileen Glovsky