“A self-effacing memoir that uses a clever gambit to keep its author honest.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“This thought-provoking, pointedly unconventional memoir navigates the complex terrain of privilege, race relations, and personal reckoning in contemporary America... An inventive reckoning with age, whiteness, writing, and life itself.”

—BookLife

“... relatable, erudite, philosophical, funny, and lyrical... With honest, confessional, and transparent prose, Gidding and his alter ego entertainingly “sweep things back out from under the rug, for all to see.”

—The US Review of Books

“... innovative structure and unflinching self-examination… a challenging, highly rewarding contribution to the current discussions surrounding privilege, race, and identity.”

—IndieReader

“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

“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 uncompromising, at times self-flagellating energy of a much younger man trying to figure out his place in the universe... 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

“Joshua Gidding enables the reader to understand the process and meaning of memoir writing in ways we never imagined. Under the sometimes unwelcome light of ‘biographization,’ the people he has wronged and cherished are showcased in an extraordinary manner that rekindles the embers of lives that might otherwise be lost. This is an extraordinary book that invites us to join as participants, not voyeurs. The journey is worth it. You’ll see your world differently (and perhaps more fully) after visiting here. I promise.”

—Murray Sinclair, author of the Ben Crandel mystery trilogy and the novel F. Scott Fitzgerald: American Spy

“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––his deep loves, betrayals, abysmal grief, his incompleteness, his wit, his inwardness, self-consciousness, blindness, ungenerousness and expansiveness, via his art––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, searching for important truths about race and privilege, holding them to the light, inspecting them, refusing the shade and comfort of triteness, preferring instead to keep himself in the harsh light. In doing so, he has articulated something essentially human: the need to be heard, whoever we are. Gidding’s exploration 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)

“A friend of mine wanted to know why some relatives swept dust into the room instead of out the door. She found out that her Jewish family got swept out of Spain in 1492, and that it was considered sacrilegious to sweep the dust out past the mezuzah on the front doorframe. Now look at this passage from Old White Man Writing: ‘I thought of bundling my books together and naming them “Out from under the Rug.” The idea being that the stuff I was writing about—failure, and loss, and shame—is the stuff that, in America, gets swept under the rug. And I was the guy to sweep it back out again.’ Well, it’s all here. He’s a brilliant confessional American with top skills in the comedic self-deprecation department. The sacred in his work is literature, authors, and the making of story from searing loss. A great book is the best imaginary friend, and readers will delight in the parasocial completion that comes from listening in to Gidding’s storytelling.”

—John Whalen-Bridge, author (Political Fiction and the American Self and Tibet on Fire), editor (The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature and Writing as Enlightenment), authorized biographer of Maxine Hong Kingston (forthcoming), and Associate Professor of English, National University of Singapore

“Josh Gidding takes an unsparing look at his own life as a self-described liberal white man of privilege. The result is a sharp, provocative, and brutally honest account that lays bare the complexities and contradictions of being an ‘old white man writing’ about race in today’s world.”

—Stephanie Staal, author of Reading Women: How the Great Books of Feminism Changed My Life and The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of Our Parents’ Divorce 

“Think you have a firm handle on the political, cultural, and institutional changes in the last couple of decades? Well, you’re wrong. Joshua Gidding’s Old White Man Writing delightfully and warmly upsets those blubby certainties, not to embarrass us but to delight us with a wonderful play on our deep (and shallow) certainties.”

—James R. Kincaid, Aerol Arnold Professor of English, Emeritus, University of Southern California, and author of the novels Lost and A History of the African American People (Proposed), by Strom Thurmond (with Percival Everett), and many books of literary and cultural criticism

An sharp and honest new memoir by Joshua Gidding, PhD, that analyzes seventy years of his life, addressing topics of race, privilege, grief, and age.

The author's publicists are pursuing a full PR campaign in support of the book and its author.