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Synopsis
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?
Author Bio
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 Old White Man Writing (forthcoming in April, 2025) 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.
