OLD WHITE MAN WRITING

A hyperaware liberal writer grapples with his own privilege and bigotry in this self-dissecting memoir.

Gidding’s memoir may remind readers of the oft-mentioned Philip Roth. He uses humor, frankness, and biting self-critique as he attempts to plumb questions about his whiteness and the guilt attached to it. A self-described “failure” as a writer and academic, he struggles with the views of a new, more socially conscious 21st-century America. He wonders if success in publishing might not have escaped him if he were Black, younger, a woman, or someone LGBTQ+, even as this sort of flawed thinking clashes with his identification as a liberal. Told nonlinearly, Gidding talks about lack of interest in Black literature and his worry that his dislike of the teacher in his Whiteness Awareness Study Group, an anti-oppression group to study the role of whiteness in relation to racism, is rooted in misogyny. This segues into his views on the genre of biography overall; the difficult and embarrassing interactions he had with Black people during his childhood; the slow, harrowing loss of his first wife, Diane, to cancer; and the Asian woman he dated shortly after her death. Gidding is far from gentle with himself about these topics. But, surprisingly, a second voice chimes in to criticize him even further—the Nabokovian character of Joßche, a German-Catholic literary biographer with a titanium membrane in his skull, a creative alter ego. The author, aware of his whiteness as he tackles the difficult subject matter of race, constantly self-corrects his own thinking, attempting to mitigate any criticism that might come from an outside source. (The presence of Joßche and their rivalry make this largely unnecessary.) Gidding’s efforts to be understood and to reckon with his own biases are often sympathetic. He also movingly portrays his feelings of loss and change after the death of his first wife.

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