Belittlement and Self-Aggrandisement

When  Joseph Epstein called Jilly Biden in the Wall Street Journal “kiddo” this cute kidding caused great outrage,
because obedience to two rules, “Do not leave a mess and be a man,” won’t protect belittlers from being heard without rage.
Though self-aggrandizement is by Donald Trump more highly than self-belittlement esteemed,
it did not prevent him from enabling twenty Israeli hostages to be  redeemed.

In “Look Ma, No Hands!,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2025, Jesse Tisch, reviewing “Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life” by Joseph Epstein and “Familiarity Breeds Content: New and Selected Essays by Joseph Epstein:”

Memoir is risky business. Its reputation? Slightly dubious. Its vices? Vanity, indiscretion, omission. Don’t trust it, said Orwell, unless it reveals something shameful. Even then, you might wonder why someone probes their past, poking around in the attic of their psyche. Why not let demons rest?

If anyone understands these hazards, it’s Joseph Epstein, a great practitioner and skeptic of personal writing. “We know all autobiographies are public lies,” he once wrote. Elsewhere, he called memoir self-gossip—“with roughly the same degree of truthfulness.” Memoirs are “cover-ups,” he wrote, and “delightfully clever deceptions.” Write one? He swore he wouldn’t.

A few years ago, Epstein changed his mind. The result is Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life, which does little self-gossiping and barely breaks a sweat. A charming publicity photo shows the gray-haired author on a unicycle, face calm, pants pressed, shirt tucked in. He is without his signature bowtie, but the message is clear—as clear as Epstein’s crystalline prose. This is a man who keeps his balance. It also whispers a warning: Charm offensive ahead.
Charm, of a highly cultivated sort, is Epstein’s trademark, and, fittingly, he’s had a charmed career as a writer and editor, a career hardly possible today. Epstein began in 1959, a golden era for intellectual magazines, when freelancers could choose between Dissent, Commentary, and The New Republic. Epstein chose all three. He then revived The American Scholar—a fusty journal that, by his own admission, had bored the heck out of him.