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?

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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?

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Old White Man Writing

Old White Man Writing

by Joshua Gidding
Old White Man Writing

Old White Man Writing

by Joshua Gidding

Overview

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798891380912
Publisher: Mascot Books
Publication date: 04/01/2025
Pages: 256
Product dimensions: 8.90(w) x 5.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Joshua Gidding grew up in Los Angeles, and currently teaches writing at Highline College, near Seattle. He has also taught at Stony Brook University, Dowling College, Holy Cross, and the University of Southern California. He holds a BA in classics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a PhD in English from USC. Before entering academia he worked for many years as a script-reader for various Hollywood studios, and also as a security guard, busboy, and short-order cook. He is the author of Failure: An Autobiography (Cyan Books, 2007), The Old Girl (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), and numerous essays and book reviews. He is also the editor of The Ways We Were: Exeter Remembered, 1968-1972 (PEA Class of ’72, 2022). His essay “On Not Being Proust: An Essay in Literary Failure” was listed as a “Notable Essay” 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, who died in 2004.

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