‘Old White Man Writing’ by Joshua Gidding is an Entertaining, Literary, and Subversive Memoir Reflecting on Racism
In this entertaining, literary, and subversive memoir, seventy-year-old writer Joshua Gidding grapples with the social and cultural changes in twenty-first-century America. In the process of re-evaluating his privileged background, the author explores his relationships with some of the people of color in his life, and begins to address the white guilt and complex feelings arising from an uneasy racial conscience. Leaning politically to the left of center, he nevertheless takes a nuanced approach to some of the most topical, timely issues of our age. Balancing themes of racism, entitlement, exceptionalism, bereavement, and biography, his approach throughout remains humorous and self-deprecating.
The events and reflections in Old White Man Writing are conveyed through two unforgettable characters: the author himself, who is the unreliable narrator of his own story, and a fictional alter-ego named Joßche, a German literary biographer with a titanium membrane in his skull— the result of a childhood bicycle accident. Joßche’s commentary, frequently interspersed throughout the story, keeps Josh honest (or at least tries to), giving way at the end to rather surprising results. Ultimately, the reader and both Joshes face a challenging question, whose roots run deep through our contemporary culture: In an age of increasing diversity, who gets to have a biography, who doesn’t, and why?
Old White Man Writing will be released on April 1, 2025, published by Mascot Books.
Praise for Old White Man Writing:
“Gidding proves to be ‘old’ only literally. His memoir is replete with a bracing, meta modernity—sometimes deeply funny, sometimes deeply rueful—and has the uncom- promising, at times self-flagellating energy of a much younger man trying to figure out his place in the universe. This is a writer determined to reveal himself with an honesty that is both breathtaking and rare.” —Howard Franklin, writer and director, Quick Change and The Public Eye
“Howard Jacobson said that ‘art is made . . . in the language of the dispossessed . . . by those who consider themselves to have failed at whatever isn’t art.’ Joshua Gidding, who titled his previous memoir Failure, is a connoisseur of his own malfunctions and he interrogates them again here in his own alive, discursive, crude, poetic, erudite, funny, brave, joyful, heartbreaking, and ultimately liberating ‘language of the dispossessed.’” —Jo Perry, author of The World Entire, Pure, and the Dead series
“This is vintage Josh Gidding—honest, unflinching, unflattering, hopeful, and oh so refreshingly real. With a keen eye and sharp intellect, Gidding excavates his own life, and that excavation is as meaningful—and necessary—as it is uncomfortable. But that’s the point. We squirm because he’s telling us the parts that normally get swept under the rug. This book is a spring cleaning of dirty secrets, and contributes a valuable voice to an important conversation.” —Greg November, Jack Straw Fellow (2021) and author of “The Business of Killing Tony” (Boulevard)
“Joshua Gidding, the Pessoa of his own disquiet, is a master of tonal nuance, working to nail the least discrepancy between his language and the truth of what he feels. He is onto himself, and onto himself being onto himself—a regress that exposes, chastens, and, for the reader, delights.” —Sven Birkerts, critic, editor, and author of The Miró Worm and the Mysteries of Writing (forthcoming) and many other books
“In Old White Man Writing, Joshua Gidding takes an unflinching look at seventy years of life—ideas, learning and teaching, love, joy, regret, privilege, sorrow, pain, hate, guilt, friendship, parenthood, writing, shame, and even the act of self-examination—with a view to a verdict. This is memoir as blood sport.” —Thomas Perry, author of Hero, The Old Man (now a series streaming on Hulu), the Jane Whitefield collection, and many other bestselling novels
“Through his narrative, Gidding comes across as relatable, erudite, philosophical, funny, and lyrical. Writing about the little things in life, especially ones that shape personality, is not easy. His teenaged insensitivity to having a Black maid, the private language and shared humor of marriage, and the banal customs and petty cruelties of humans that he shares in the book are straight from a Philip Roth novel. Readers of Karl Ove Knausgård will enjoy this extraordinary journey through an ordinary life. With honest, confessional, and transparent prose, Gidding and his alter ego entertainingly “sweep things back out from under the rug, for all to see.” —Priscilla Estes, The US Review of Books
“His approach is searching, often expressive of uncertainties, but humane and compelling. Despite the title, Gidding eschews both reactionary pushback against societal changes and empty sloganeering endorsing them, and the book grows rich and affecting as it digs into stories of the Major and Minor Periods of Gidding’s life—and whether they’re his stories to tell… What’s worth marveling at is how, even as he second guesses himself and refuses to “refrain from making bad jokes,” Gidding, with biting prose and incisive wit, hits on uncomfortable truths and shares a host of moving, urgent stories from his life, each studded with insights.” — BookLife by Publishers Weekly
About the Author:
Joshua Gidding teaches writing at Highline College, near Seattle. He has also taught at Dowling College, Stony Brook University, Holy Cross, and the University of Southern California. He is the author of Failure: An Autobiography (2007), The Old Girl (1980), and numerous essays and book reviews. He is also the editor of The Ways We Were: Exeter Remembered, 1968 -1972 (2022). His essay “On Not Being Proust: An Essay in Literary Failure,” was listed in Best American Essays 2009. He lives in Seattle with his second wife, Julie Tower Gilmour, an interfaith chaplain. He has a son, Zachary, by his first wife Diane, a psychiatric rehabilitation counselor, who died in 2004.
Readers can connect with Joshua on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads.
To learn more, visit https://joshgidding.com