OLD WHITE MAN WRITING: A MEMOIR OF PRIVILEGE AND REFLECTION is an ambitious and structurally inventive memoir that finds author Joshua Gidding grappling with issues of privilege, race, age, and even the very act of writing. Through an innovative dual-narrator approach, Gidding creates a dialogue between himself and his alter-ego Joßche: a fellow writer who serves as both critic and conscience throughout the narrative.

Central to OLD WHITE MAN WRITING is Gidding’s delicate examination of his relationships with domestic workers (like Aline Jackson and Paul Kirschner), his marriage to his late wife Diane, and the romance that followed her death. These personal histories become launching points for deeper explorations of race, class, and self-deception. The memoir’s most affecting passages deal with loss and memory—particularly in Gidding’s account of what he calls “The Vanished Language,” or the private vocabulary he shared with Diane: “A dead language, like the Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit I had studied in college,” he writes. “Even more dead, actually, because those languages are preserved in writing, whereas our special language, since it was never written and often went unspoken, has now vanished.”

A key component of OLD WHITE MAN WRITING is Gidding’s refusal to settle for easy confessions or simple, reductive assessments. Instead, the author develops what he calls “biographization,” or what he describes as “a form of biography—a more inclusive, less professionalized kind of third-person life-writing—that doesn’t quite exist yet.” According to Gidding, biographization aims to record and honor the countless individuals whose lives might otherwise go undocumented.

Throughout the narrative, Joßche challenges Gidding’s tendency toward what he terms “self-laceration,” ultimately telling him: “You are not so exceptional, Gozhua—not so exceptionally good, and certainly not so exceptionally bad. You are pretty much like everybody else—painful as that might be for you to hear.” To that point, the tension between self-examination and self-indulgence effectively drives much of the book’s internal dialogue.

For his part, Gidding maintains a consistently self-effacing tone throughout, often undercutting his own authority. For instance, reflecting on his teaching career, Gidding notes, “I went to a second-rate graduate school (at least it was at the time I went to it), and then got a job at a fourth-rate private college on Long Island. (Literally fourth-rate; it was ranked consistently in the fourth—that is, the bottom—tier of American colleges and universities by US News & World Report.)”

Gidding is also particularly frank about his racial blind spots and prejudices. When examining his “1 percent” that finds Trump appealing, he acknowledges, “Even now, after the horrendous (and horrendously lowbrow) debacle of Jan. 6, and the plot to destroy democracy and make our country a dictatorship… I cannot say that he is completely without appeal to a tiny part of me.” This kind of uncomfortable honesty makes for an effective approach when examining privilege and complicity.

While some readers might find the memoir’s meta-literary aspects and frequent digressions challenging, these elements ultimately reward patience and are in service of examining how we construct and understand our own stories. Whether the minutiae of Gidding’s life merits biographical treatment is ultimately for readers to decide, but his tortured internal dialogue about that very question is surprisingly (and universally) resonant—and, therefore, vitally important.

Through its innovative structure and unflinching self-examination, Joshua Gidding’s OLD WHITE MAN WRITING offers a new approach to the biographical template—resulting in a challenging, highly rewarding contribution to the current discussions surrounding privilege, race, and identity.

~James Weiskittel for IndieReader