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 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.
About 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 Josh’s 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?
An interview with Joshua Gidding
Why do you write in the genre(s) that you do?
Before about the age of 50, I had always written autobiographical fiction. But then, after I had just finished another autobiographical novel, for which I was unable to find an agent, I said to my late wife, Diane, “Maybe I should just give up on autobiographical fiction and write a straight autobiography.”
“What would you call it?” she asked.
I answered immediately, “Failure: An Autobiography.”
She laughed, and I knew I had something. It was published with that title, and I have written autobiography and personal essays ever since. Now, over 20 years later, I am researching another novel, but I really have no idea what will happen with that. It could well turn into another memoir.
Do you keep a notebook of ideas?
No. When I get an idea, I write it down on a 3 X 5 index card. If the cards start piling up, I begin thinking that I may have the start of a personal essay.
Do you have a muse?
Yes. Actually, I have two muses: my late wife, Diane, and my current wife, Julie. Julie is also my first and most important reader and editor. If it gets past her, I know I’ve got something.
Are you more of a fan of plot-driven stories or character-driven stories?
Definitely character-driven stories. I admire people who can write plot-driven stories, probably because I can’t.
For many years I worked as a Hollywood script-reader (or “story analyst”). I read and synopsized hundreds and hundreds of scripts, and just about all of them were plot-driven, because of course most movies are plot-driven.
I always liked reading a good script, and there were not that many of them, but I think I always recognized that my own writing interests did not lie in the direction of plot. When I was a reader at Warner Bros. Pictures, I took a lot of not-exactly-career-advancing philosophy classes through UCLA Extension, which eventually led to graduate school (but in English, not philosophy).
Fill in the blank: “People will like your book if they like stories about…”
Failure, disappointment, inadequacy, incompetence, guilt, and shame. And hope. Let us not forget hope. It is the most important thing I write about, but for me, at least, hope has no meaning unless it is developed in the face of something opposing it.
What are your thoughts on typewriters?
Typewriters are beautiful and evocative antiques. I love antiques. (I am something of an antique myself.)
I suppose that all of the twentieth-century writers I admire (see the “Mt. Rushmore” question below), except for Proust and Henry James (who were born in the nineteenth century), wrote on typewriters. I used to too, until they started having the script-readers at Warner Bros. start writing on computers in 1983.
The computer changed my writing life, as I’m sure it did for all writers. I always write longhand first, then type up what I have written and work from that. Before computers, I used to type on an electric typewriter, but now using a typewriter seems like a silly affectation.
Though I still have a soft spot for the antique mechanics of the typewriter. And the image of a manual typewriter is always appealing – nostalgic, evocative, romantically analog.
Would you rather own a bookstore or run a library?
Library, I think. I love bookstores, and all things considered I think I’ve probably spent more time in bookstores than in libraries; but I have no head for owning and running a business, and the sheltered atmosphere of a library is very appealing to me.
How do you name your characters? If you write nonfiction, do you ever change the names of your characters, and if so, how do you decide what names to change them to?
In both fiction and non-fiction, I try to come as close as I reasonably can to the real name of the person I am writing about, or basing my writing on (if it’s fiction). I don’t particularly like that I do this (it seems a failure of the imagination), but if I don’t do it – at least while I am writing, before the revising stage, I have trouble visualizing the character.
Once I’ve drafted the writing to my satisfaction, I can change the name to one less recognizable, but I would rather not do this unless I feel the person I am modeling the character after will be hurt by my representation of them. But even then, they will probably recognize themselves despite the name-change.
One of my precepts is that – in writing as in life — you never really get away with anything. Nor should you. This is maybe one of the reasons why so many people don’t like writers. And I can’t say I blame them.
What is your favorite website that you use to promote your writing?
I don’t use any websites to promote my writing. At least I haven’t to date. This is probably my bad. Though now that I have hired a great publicist for Old White Man Writing, that will probably change.
If Hollywood bought the rights to your book, would you want it to be turned into a movie or series?
That’s kind of like asking if you won the lottery, would you rather buy a Rolls Royce or a Bentley? Since I don’t really care what kind of car I drive, it wouldn’t much matter to me. But maybe that analogy is a poor one, since I don’t feel my book will ever attract either film or TV attention. It’s too literary and reflective; it would be very, very difficult to adapt dramatically.
Who is your dream audiobook narrator?
Maybe the writer Andrew Solomon? (The author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.) I have watched one of his TED talks, the one about how the worst moments of our lives build our character and identity, at least a dozen times. I assign it to my composition students every term. I love his voice, his sensibility, his sense of humor. He is one of my heroes.
Do you try to hit a certain page or word count with each writing session?
My goal is to write two longhand pages every session, but since I start off by rereading and revising the previous session’s writing, I am not always able to achieve this goal. I find the most important thing is to have reached a reasonable level of satisfaction with what I have already written before writing anything new. Otherwise, it’s easy for me to write myself down a rabbit hole.
Do you have any writing rituals?
I cannot write without drinking several mugs of tea, with milk and a little sugar. Tea is my drug of choice.
Also, I always begin writing a new essay with a fountain pen. Then, I type up and print out what I have written longhand, and work from that printed copy, revising and then composing as I go. I never compose anything new without having first printed out and revised what I composed the previous session, because of the rabbit-hole problem.
What are your passions/obsessions outside of writing?
Very few, and those are of a very boring nature: reading, walking, cooking and eating. And tea-drinking (only loose-leaf black tea).
I am also in an African drumming circle, but I wouldn’t call that a passion. It is more just a pleasant and needed escape from the reading and writing that make up most of my conscious existence.
Have you made any public appearances to promote your book?
Not yet, but I hope that will change after publication next spring. I find self-promotion very uncomfortable.
Who would you most want to read your book, living or dead?
That’s an uncomfortable question, because I think the people I would most want to read my book – all of them dead – are the very people I would be most afraid of reading my book. (See next question.)
Of living authors, I think I would most like to be read by Nicholson Baker, since I love his sensibility and humor, and feel he is in some ways a fellow-traveler – though he has probably traveled much farther, and dared much more, than I have.
Who is on your Mt. Rushmore of greatest/inspirational authors?
Proust, Wordsworth, Bellow, and Roth (and probably in that order). With Thomas Mann a very close fifth (He’s definitely in the pantheon, if not on the mountain).
What is your favorite bookish possession?
I am not a collector, but I have a special fondness for the old seven-volume Vintage paperback edition of Proust, in the pastel covers with their line drawings, and the now-excoriated C.K. Scott Moncrieff solo translation (which, despite its flaws, I still prefer to all the others I have read). This is the edition I had in college, when I first read Proust, and it occupies a special place on my bookshelf.
Have you ever mentored another writer with their writing?
I don’t know if “mentor” is quite the right word – it seems a little august — but for many years I have had a friend, Kate, who is a natural (you might say “naïf”) poet, and whose poetry I have often read and critiqued (though I am not a poet myself, only a student of poetry – which is why I don’t really consider myself a proper mentor for her) – and not always to her liking. (Though I figure she wouldn’t keep showing me her poems if she didn’t want my honest response).
Is there an idea that a non-writer has pitched to you that you have written or considered writing?
I have a friend I have known since first grade who has had the most interesting and eventful life of anyone I have ever known. For a number of years, she was with an alarmingly handsome gypsy named Gypsy, who was said to have killed a man in Bamako.
She had many adventures (and a son) with him and was on the lam for a while (for forgery) and suffered a terrible family tragedy (her younger sister killed herself with their father’s gun, and my friend came home from school and found her body on the bed). And that’s only part of her story.
Anyway, she is also a very good writer, but I don’t think she has the sitzfleisch to write her story. She wants to find a ghost writer to tell her story to.
I have sometimes wondered whether I should be that ghost writer. And I have also sometimes thought of basing a novel on her story. But I don’t think I will ever do either of these things. And yet, the thought of her extraordinary story eventually disappearing with her also deeply chagrins me.
What is the most unique way that an idea for a piece of writing has come to you.
I suppose that would have to be the time I was apartment-sitting in my girlfriend’s apartment in Greenwich Village while she was out of town. One night I was sleepwalking, and managed walk out the door without any clothes on and lock myself out of the apartment.
It took me many hours, naked in the hallway in the middle of the night, with only a New Yorker taken from the hallway bathroom to cover my privates, to finally get back into the apartment. And then, only with the help of a kind neighbor, the police, and a locksmith.
For many years afterward, I was working on a short story based on this experience. I never quite got it right but was never quite able to lay it to rest, either. I may not be finished with it yet.
Are you a big reader? Do you own a large collection of books, or are you more of a borrower?
Yes, I am a passionate reader – perhaps more these days of nonfiction than of fiction, ever since I started writing personal essays (about ten years ago). But I still go through periods where I crave fiction.
I own a lot of books – a couple thousand at least – most of which I have not read. I feel bad about this – but not so bad that I have stopped buying books. A book represents a certain hope for me.
Each book possesses its own peculiar form of hope – and perhaps virtue as well. I guess I’m one of those romantic idealists who think that books can make you a better person (even if you don’t read them! Just having them seems a gesture in the direction of hope and virtue).
Ridiculous, I know, yet I think this fantasy – which is not entirely fantasy – is why I keep buying them. To stop buying books would be, for me, to run out of hope.
Have you ever gone away to work on a piece of writing? If not, where would you go if you could?
In the spring of 1978, when I was almost 24, I left New York City and returned home to LA for about five months to start working on my first novel. I wrote around half of it in LA, and when I was lucky enough to get a contract for it, I returned to New York to finish it.
I had thought at first I might go down to my parents’ place in Baja, just south of Ensenada, to write some of the book, but that never happened. Back at home, in the room I grew up in, at the desk where I did my homework in grade school and junior high (I went away for high school), was where it happened.
I do still have dreams of going somewhere to write at least part of a book, but in my dreams, that place is very humdrum and ordinary, like Pittsburgh (where I have never been), or Jersey City, where I have only spent a few hours. Places like this for some reason spark my imagination, and I imagine I might be able to write well there. It’s the “everydayness” of such places that especially inspires and appeals to me. (One of my favorite poems is Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”).
What is an annoying thing that a non-writer has assumed about writers or the act of writing?
I think some people who aren’t writers tend to romanticize the working methods and also the lives of writers. Hemingway would be one classic example of such a writer. But even Hemingway, romantic though he was in many ways, could have told them, indeed did tell us, that writing is mostly REwriting; and rewriting – and rewriting again, and then rewriting some more – is just about the most unromantic thing there is. So, I often tell my composition students that writing, which is really nothing other than thinking, is kind of like plumbing: inglorious, but try living without it.
How do you measure the success of your writing career?
My writing career to date – and I am 70 years old now – has not been a success. In fact, I wrote a book – my first memoir, Failure: An Autobiography – under the assumption that it had been a failure as a career.
But I’m not even sure now that this assumption was correct; it may have been just a useful fiction I needed to believe in order to write that book. In any case, I certainly have not had much of a writing career to speak of.
I guess, though, that more rightly, I could speak of the combined success and failure of my writing itself. And I would measure the success of my writing by the response of my wife Julie, who is a great editor, and who has helped my writing more than anyone else.
If Julie likes what I’ve written, I know at least I am on to something; if she doesn’t like it, I listen very carefully to why. Then I swallow my pride, rethink, and try again. Writing is thinking, rethinking, and rewriting.
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