Dottie & Dottie

Chapter 1: The Gospel According to Dottie

The first letter Dottie ever answered was from a woman in Scottsdale who wanted to know if it was normal to fantasize about pushing her mother-in-law into a decorative koi pond.

Dottie—the original Dottie, the real one, whose legal name was Dorothy Huang and whose legal blood-alcohol level at the time of writing was anybody's guess—responded with four hundred words of such luminous, gin-soaked wisdom that the Scottsdale woman not only kept her mother-in-law dry but also framed the column above her toilet, where it remained for eleven years until the house was sold and the new owners, who did not have mothers-in-law, replaced it with a cross-stitch of a French bulldog.

That was 2007.

By 2012, Dear Dottie was syndicated in two hundred newspapers, which in the newspaper industry was the equivalent of being syndicated in two hundred life rafts on a sinking ocean liner. People read Dottie in Omaha and Orlando and Eau Claire. They read her in dentists' waiting rooms and airport terminals and, in one documented case, aloud at a city council meeting in Reno to settle a zoning dispute. The zoning dispute was not settled, but everyone agreed Dottie had made excellent points about emotional boundaries.

Dottie's voice was singular. Warm but never soft. Funny but never cruel—or rather, cruel only in the direction cruelty should travel, which is upward, toward people with power, and never downward, toward people with pain.

She told a cheating husband in Tampa to "develop hobbies other than cowardice, since cowardice requires no practice and you are already proficient."

She told a lonely teenager in Portland that "being interesting is considerably better than being liked by boring people, and boring people are the only ones who insist on likability as a prerequisite for lunch."

She once ended a family inheritance dispute that had spanned three generations and two lawsuits by suggesting that everyone involved "try dying less dramatically than your father, who managed to turn a will reading into a one-act play and still didn't get a standing ovation."

Dottie was beloved.

Dottie was trusted.

Dottie was also, by 2016, dead.

Dorothy Huang died on a Tuesday in April, in her apartment above a bakery in San Francisco, surrounded by fourteen years of reader mail, a cat named Fiscal Responsibility, and a half-finished column about whether it was ethical to ghost a ghost. She was sixty-seven. The cause of death was a stroke, though her editor would later say, privately and with a glass of something expensive, that Dorothy had been running on caffeine, spite, and an unwillingness to let idiots have the last word for at least a decade.

The National Tribune Syndicate—NTS to its employees, "those people" to its creditors—faced a problem.

Dear Dottie generated more revenue than any other feature in the syndicate's portfolio. More than the crossword. More than the horoscopes. More than the editorial cartoons, which had been losing papers steadily since the invention of having opinions on the internet for free.

Killing the column would be like burning the last oil well because the geologist had retired.

So NTS did what any responsible media company would do.

They lied.

They announced that Dottie would be "taking a brief sabbatical to recharge her legendary pen," a phrase so hollow it echoed, and then they quietly, frantically, desperately searched for someone who could write like Dorothy Huang.

They could not find one person.

So they found two.

The arrangement was the brainchild of Marcia Pierce, NTS's editor-in-chief, a woman whose competence was matched only by her paranoia and whose paranoia was matched only by the actual number of things going wrong at any given moment. Marcia had risen through the ranks of print journalism the way one rises through the ranks of a crumbling empire: by being the person willing to hold the ceiling up while everyone else ran for the exits.

She was fifty-four, divorced twice ("once for cause, once for sport," she told people), and possessed of a managerial style that combined the warmth of a tax audit with the efficiency of a guillotine. Her desk was clean. Her inbox was emptier than anyone's inbox had a right to be. Her office contained exactly one personal item: a framed photograph of her dog, Gerald, who was the only living creature Marcia trusted without reservation.

Marcia's plan was simple, elegant, and slightly unhinged.

She would hire two writers.

Each would write the column three days a week.

Neither would know the other's identity.

Sundays would be reruns, because even fictional wisdom requires rest.

The first writer she found was Julie Alvarez.

Julie was forty-one, a divorced Chicago schoolteacher who had left teaching two years earlier for reasons she described as "I was either going to start writing or start setting things on fire, and writing has fewer legal consequences." She had published a handful of essays in small magazines—sharp, funny pieces about divorce, public education, and the particular loneliness of being the only person at a dinner party who finds the host's anecdote about Tuscany genuinely boring.

Marcia read Julie's work and recognized something in it. Not Dorothy's voice exactly, but the architecture of Dorothy's voice. The way Julie built a sentence was the way Dorothy built a sentence: foundation first, then the joke, then the knife, then the kindness that made you forget about the knife until you were home and bleeding.

Julie was hired over the phone. She was told she would be writing Dear Dottie Mondays through Wednesdays. She was told the pay was decent but not life-changing. She was told she would never meet the person writing the other half of the column, and that if she tried, she would be fired, sued, and spoken about in tones normally reserved for people who spoil movie endings at parties.

Julie accepted because she needed the money, because she missed having a voice that people listened to, and because—though she would not have admitted this to Marcia or to anyone—she had read Dear Dottie every morning for six years and had secretly believed she could do it better.

The second writer was Ben Rosenthal.

Ben was thirty-eight, a failed novelist living in Milwaukee in an apartment that could generously be described as "a place where a human being technically resided." He had published one novel at twenty-nine—a dense, funny, structurally ambitious book about three generations of a Jewish family in the Midwest that had received the kind of reviews writers dream about ("astonishing debut," "a major new voice") and the kind of sales figures writers have nightmares about (4,200 copies, including the ones his mother bought in bulk and distributed at her book club like communion wafers).

He had been working on his second novel for nine years. The manuscript was 740 pages long, covered four decades, and had a working title that changed every six months. Currently it was called The Conditions of Departure, which Ben knew sounded like an airline policy but which he insisted captured the book's themes of loss, memory, and the impossibility of leaving anywhere cleanly.

No one had read it.

Not his agent, who had stopped asking.

Not his mother, who had started asking in a way that suggested she was asking about his mental health rather than his manuscript.

Not anyone.

Ben had been making a living—if you could call it living, and Ben often wondered—writing freelance copy for regional magazines, the kind of work that paid in amounts small enough to feel insulting but large enough to prevent him from claiming actual poverty. He had written a 2,000-word profile of a Milwaukee cheese shop that the owner called "the best thing anyone has ever written about Gruyère," which Ben had framed ironically and then looked at unironically every morning while eating cereal.

Marcia found Ben through his agent, who had been trying to find Ben literally anything that would keep him fed and writing. She read his novel—the whole 740 pages—in two nights, and called his agent at six in the morning to say, "He's wasted on cheese."

Ben was hired over email, because he did not answer his phone, because answering the phone required the kind of optimism Ben had not felt since the Clinton administration.

He was told the same things Julie had been told. Three days. Anonymity. Legal consequences.

He accepted because he needed the money, because he had not felt useful in years, and because—though he would not have admitted this to Marcia or to anyone—the idea of being someone else, even a fictional advice columnist, felt easier than being himself.

And so Dear Dottie continued.

Mondays through Wednesdays, Julie answered America's questions with the brisk compassion of a woman who had survived a marriage, a school system, and the Chicago Transit Authority.

Thursdays through Saturdays, Ben answered them with the melancholy wit of a man who understood loneliness the way a cartographer understands coastlines: in precise, loving detail.

Sundays were reruns.

And nobody noticed.

That was the remarkable thing. The readers didn't notice. The newspapers didn't notice. The internet, which noticed everything and had opinions about all of it, did not notice. Dottie's voice shifted slightly midweek the way a river shifts slightly around a bend—the current changed, but the water kept moving in the same direction, and if you weren't watching very carefully, you'd never see the seam.

Julie's Dottie was a little warmer. A little more likely to tell you that your feelings were valid before telling you that your behavior was not.

Ben's Dottie was a little sharper. A little more likely to make you laugh before making you cry, which is the only ethical order in which those two things should occur.

Together, they were Dottie.

And Dottie was perfect.