Old White Man Writing by Joshua Gidding

Joshua Gidding

Author

Old White Man Writing

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?

Reviews

This thought-provoking, pointedly unconventional memoir navigates the complex terrain of privilege, race relations, and personal reckoning in contemporary America. In the playful first pages, Gidding (author of Failure: An Autobiography) writes, of himself, “Look at him go. He writes, he hopes.” From there he considers, among other concerns, questions of why write at all, especially as an old white man, and what it means to write when he feels “muzzled” as “certain topics—race, gender, and so on—are off-limits for oldsters like me to consider in a more critical light.” 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.

Gidding grapples with these complexities while employing a unique narrative structure that presents both the author's voice and a critical alter-ego, Joßche, prone to hectoring, italicized interruptions. As Gidding describes, with rare and welcome frankness, his youthful introductions to America’s racial realities, Joßche takes on the role of the uncharitable reader, lobbing stinkbombs like “Curious about a biracial family, but not about African American literature?” Gidding's approach to hot-button issues is refreshingly nuanced and self-deprecating, plunging into topics like the unbridled anger that some white people feel towards marginalized groups. Giddin’s writing about family is likewise exploratory and open-hearted, his lifelong tendency toward the Lucretius Effect and a “Imagination of Disaster,” and finding a way to live after the death of his first wife.

The result, while innovative and often hilarious, can feel fretful, though that is the spirit of the project, if not the era. 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.

Takeaway: An inventive reckoning with age, whiteness, writing, and life itself.

Comparable Titles: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, Garrett Bucks’s The Right Kind of White.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A-

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