Local Author Lee Gutkind

Lee Gutkind, the founding editor of Creative Nonfiction magazine, delivers his new memoir My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies. As a longstanding advocate of “true story genre,” Lee has reported on a wide range of issues—robots and artificial intelligence, mental illness, organ transplants, veterinarians and animals, baseball, motorcycle enthusiasts—and explored them all with his unique voice and approach.

In My Last Eight Thousand Days, Gutkind turns his notepad and tape recorder inward, using immersion journalism to perform a deep dive on himself. Here, he offers a memoir of his life as a journalist, editor, husband, father, and Pittsburgh native, recounting not only his many triumphs, but also exposing his missteps and challenges. The overarching concern which frames these brave, often confessional stories, is his obsession and fascination with aging: his resistance, his fears—how aging, as well as loneliness, provoked anxieties and unearthed long-rooted tensions— and how he came to accept, even enjoy, his mental and physical decline. Gutkind documents the realities of aging with his characteristically blunt, melancholic wit and authenticity that drive the quiet force of all his work.