Instead of matching towels, we have his-and-her memoirs.
Subtitled “A memoir of marriage, addiction, and healing,” the book is short on healing, while the addiction and masochism never appear to end. After Hunter’s fifth — or was it sixth? — visit to rehab, Buhle still accepts his lies. “Hunter told me he was going for the yoga workshops,” she explains of a trip he took to Big Sur. “Did I believe him? Not really. Did I try to stop him? No. Anything to do with his sobriety was still beyond questioning.”
In “If We Break,” Buhle reveals a talent for denial so deep that it is left to her teenage daughters to tell her that Hunter is having an affair with their aunt and Beau Biden’s widow, Hallie. They know because they found texts on his phone. Buhle’s friends later ask, “How could you have not even suspected? You may have been the only one not to.” Ironically, it was Hallie who had warned Kathleen years earlier when she discovered photos of him with another woman at the Four Seasons in Paris: “If you leave him, Kathleen, he’ll find someone else, and then you’ll have to live with that.” (Eventually Hunter and Hallie split, too. He married Melissa Cohen, who is 17 years younger than he is, days after they met.)
After the Hallie telenovela-worthy bombshell, Buhle says that Hunter can no longer hurt her, that the worst is behind her. Reader, she is sorely mistaken.
The affair goes public in the New York Post, the tabloid that will turn Hunter’s lobbying exploits and role as a Burisma board member into something of a full-time beat. Buhle discovers that Hunter cruised the cheaters’ website Ashley Madison (Tag line: “Life is short. Have an affair.”), his cellphone bursting with sexually graphic texts to “dozens of women — none of whom I’d ever heard of before.”
Buhle and Biden met when she was 23 and they worked as members of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Oregon. A year later, she was pregnant, and they wed. Buhle grew up solidly middle class, selling hot dogs at Comiskey Park. She refers to herself as “just a silly girl from Chicago” and lives up to the description by opting to learn little about their finances, a poor move. If Hunter has any talents, it is for lying and living well beyond their means: Tom Ford togs (in D.C., where few would take notice), new teeth while hooked on crack, insisting that he meet with a sobriety coach while staying at L.A.'s pricey Chateau Marmont.
The Biden family history is marked by tremendous tragedy and loss. Hunter’s mother and baby sister were killed in a car accident when he was 3 years old and Beau a year older. The two brothers were so close that when Hunter and Kathleen’s “special” marriage — that’s her term for it — goes off the rails, she turns to Beau for help because “he was the one who fully understood Hunter.” Let that sink in.
The two sons were thick as thieves, but there’s no question that their father believed that Beau, his namesake and Delaware’s former attorney general who died of brain cancer in 2015, hung the moon and was his political heir. It could not have been easy being the Bidens’ Prince Harry. “I never saw Hunter show anything but pride toward his father and brother for their incredible accomplishments, but I wondered if their success took a toll on him,” Buhle writes.
Addiction has long been a scourge of the Biden family, and an inheritance. Asked on the 2008 campaign trail why he doesn’t imbibe, Joe Biden said, “There are enough alcoholics in my family.” Alas, there would be more.
And what do we learn of Joe and Jill Biden? Buhle is cautious and loving, the challenge of publishing a memoir while your former in-laws and three daughters’ grandparents occupy the White House. The Bidens are loving and supportive, but it takes a long time for the truth of Hunter’s addiction to be shared. In Buhle’s telling, the family is close, supportive and spends plenty of time together but is not very open.
Jill Biden is perfect, gracious yet unknowable, a distant and largely offstage character. At times, Joe Biden seems like regular folk in that he shops at Home Depot. Then again, the Bidens do not seem that much like regular folk in that their Greenville, Del., home features a double staircase, a library with carved wooden nymphs and — wait for it — an actual ballroom. When Buhle’s bookie grandfather first visits, he asks, “Who’s buried here?” Hunter’s parents may share a talent for living above their means. Buhle notes that the home was “often behind on its upkeep, and whole sections were closed to save on heating costs.”
Buhle smartly consulted a professional writer, Susan Conley, and the prose is better than many books of its ilk. But “If We Break” seems padded. There are constant trivialities about how handsome Hunter looks in a suit and exchanges of “I love you” between the couple. Note to memoir authors: Don’t do this. The book clocks in at precisely 300 pages, as though dictated by contract.
This is the ex of a politician’s now-notorious son, a woman who claims no desire to be famous, guards her privacy, then publishes a memoir at precisely the moment when her former father-in-law is at the height of his power. Perhaps the experience provides some catharsis and revenue for Buhle, who leads a D.C. collaborative space for women and assists nonprofits. Perhaps it may offer solace for others in emotionally abusive relationships with alcoholics. But is this really a book the public is asking to read?
Karen Heller is a Washington Post national features writer.
If We Break
A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing
By Kathleen Buhle
302 pp. Crown. $27
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