£25.77£25.77
£2.80
delivery:
April 16 - 24
Dispatches from: Paper Cavalier UK Sold by: Paper Cavalier UK
£10.29
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing Hardcover – 14 Jun. 2022
Purchase options and add-ons
“Kathleen Buhle’s brave and honest story transcends politics, division, hearsay, and judgment.”—Connie Britton
This is not a story about good versus evil. Or who was right. Or who was better. For decades, Kathleen Buhle chose to play the role of the good wife, beginning when, as a naïve young woman from a working-class family on the South Side of Chicago, she met the dashing son of a senator at the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Oregon. Within months of falling in love, Kathleen found herself pregnant and engaged, living a life beyond anything she’d ever known.
Determined to build her family on a foundation of love, Kathleen was convinced her and Hunter’s commitment to each other could overcome any obstacle. But when Hunter’s drinking evolved into dependency, she was forced to learn how rapidly and irrevocably a marriage can fall apart under the merciless power of addiction. When the lies became insurmountable, Kathleen was forced to reckon with the compromises she had made to try to save her marriage. She wondered if she could survive on her own.
The result is a memoir that is page-turning and heart-breaking. Here Kathleen asks why she kept so much hidden—from her daughters and herself—for so many years, why she became dependent on one man, and why she was more faithful to a vow of secrecy than to her own truth. This inspiring chronicle of radical honesty and self-actualization speaks to women who have lost part of their identity and want to reclaim it.
- Print length302 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown Pub
- Publication date14 Jun. 2022
- Dimensions14.58 x 2.79 x 21.72 cm
- ISBN-100593241053
- ISBN-13978-0593241059
Customers who bought this item also bought
Product description
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One
Portland
In 1992 I was living in Portland, Oregon, trying to reinvent myself as a social activist and tree-hugging liberal. I barely understood climate change but proudly wore my love planet earth T-shirt. With my flowing bohemian dresses and Birkenstocks, I pretended I knew something about the alternative music scene that was exploding there at the time. I couldn’t name three bands, but I could sway and groove with the best of them. I was twenty-three and working for the year as a volunteer with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps (JVC). Having grown up in working-class Chicago, I had no idea what the Pacific Northwest even looked like before I arrived, and the year in Oregon was as ambitious as anything I’d ever set out to do. I was yearning for new experiences and dreaming about who I could become.
I lived in a rambling Victorian house with seven other volunteers. We were strangers to one another but shared the belief that we could make a difference. I listened to heated discussions about the environment, the impact of logging, and what needed to happen to protect the planet. “Yeah,” I would add, nodding along. But I knew as much about logging as I did about space flight—zero. My south side Chicago neighborhood was populated by Polish and Irish laborers who were busy trying to make a living and weren’t talking about carbon footprints. But my roommates taught me to not only recycle but compost. At dinner, we passed a talking stick to make sure everyone was allowed to speak their mind without interruption. During one meal, a roommate commented on how quickly we were going through toilet paper and suggested, in all seriousness, that we each use no more than two squares. You might as well just use your hand, I thought, secretly continuing to make a toilet paper mitt.
When it was time to make the grocery list, we’d all sit down to talk about what we wanted. Gourmet coffee was all the rage in Portland, but I didn’t drink it. “If we get expensive coffee, can we also get Diet Coke?” I asked. The answer was a resounding no.
That was the year I learned that beans didn’t always come in cans and that you had to be able to tell your organic products from your nonorganic. When I inadvertently bought the wrong honey, my roommates delicately explained to me that the nonorganic honey contained pesticides. “Who knew?” I said with a smile. “Honey seems so straightforward.” That night I wrote a note and taped it to the honey bear’s chest: “I’m sorry I wasn’t enough. I was just trying to bring a little sweetness to your lives.” The bear, with his note, stayed on the counter all year.
I had been working since I was twelve, but it had been selling hot dogs at Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox, and washing dishes at a party rental store. In Oregon, I worked with adults living with mental illness, and I finally felt I was doing something that mattered. My previous four years at St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minnesota, were spent playing pool and drinking cheap beer, not sitting around debating social policy. My roommates now seemed like they’d been in the fight for social justice their whole lives while I was just getting started. But regardless of where we’d come from, JVC put us all on the same playing field. We each had an eighty-dollar monthly stipend and we explored the city together, seeing live music and hiking through the parks.
After a few weeks, I found myself dancing with a shaggy-haired volunteer who came from a little state I’d barely heard of. His name was Hunter Biden. As he swung me around that night, my heart started to beat just a little bit faster. He was shy at first, but I never stopped talking. After that night, whenever I would see him and he’d smile at me, I would feel my entire body respond. I’d never met anyone like him before. Despite the longish hair tucked behind his ears and his ripped-up jeans, he carried himself with the elegance of a movie star.
For weeks he and I found ourselves talking on the porch at every JVC party. When a few of us went to a bar the night after Thanksgiving, my eyes stayed only on Hunter, and at closing time, he walked me home, where all of my roommates were fast asleep. He and I sat in two old armchairs in a living room strewn with mismatched furniture, and I waited for him to make a move. It was our first time alone together, and the room hummed with our energy. After what seemed like hours of talking, I couldn’t take it any longer. I stood up and walked over to his chair, climbed onto his lap, put my arms around his neck, and leaned down for a kiss. Fireworks! From that moment on, my life would change in ways I’d never imagined.
Suddenly we couldn’t be apart. We walked the city for hours holding hands, and talked on the phone every night we weren’t together. I didn’t see the point in going anywhere if I couldn’t be with him. In the mornings he’d walk with me to the nonprofit where I worked, on the first floor of an Episcopal church across town, and walk home with me afterward.
While I was still trying to figure out who I was, Hunter carried himself with a confidence and maturity I’d never seen before. When he told me about the bond he had with his dad and his brother, I’d never heard a man talk so openly about loving his family. They were not just close but shared an emotional tie that seemed stronger than any I’d heard of before. When I learned that, as boys, he and his brother, Beau, had survived a car accident that killed their mother and baby sister, it felt like one more reason why he was special.
Hunter was effusive about our love too, and when he focused his attention on me, it was intoxicating. For the first time in my life, I believed that I might actually be beautiful and smart and unique, all because he said so. Just a few weeks after our first kiss, we started planning our future over Hefeweizen beer. We sat for hours, scheming about how we’d spend the rest of our lives together. First we’d get married, then I’d find a grad school program in psychology while Hunter went to law school.
We talked about our lives back home, describing every family member, every close friend, in detail. We examined every significant childhood memory and each former sweetheart. We were excited by the parts of our pasts that aligned, celebrating them with all the naïveté of early love. We both had Irish roots? Amazing! We’d both been raised Catholic? Incredible! We both loved to read, we were both idealistic dreamers. And most important, we shared a close relationship with our families. What separated us, though, was significant.
Hunter had grown up the son of a U.S. senator. His girlfriend before me was a DuPont heir. At the old estate where he lived, he had a tuxedo hanging in his closet—a tuxedo he used fairly regularly. Where he came from, lineage was a real thing.
Me? I came from Chicago’s working-class streets. I’d always felt loved and appreciated by my parents, but my life had a grittiness to it, and my childhood was more practical than aspirational. Dinner at my house was served with paper towels and often included mac and cheese out of a Tupperware bowl. There was never talk of being special.
Hunter tried to tell me that he came from a middle-class family, but nothing about his life looked remotely middle-class to me. Months later, when I went to his house for the first time, I explained to him that the middle-class families I knew didn’t live like this, let alone working-class families like mine. “Hunt,” I told him, “a kid from a middle-class family does not have a ballroom.”
The night before I flew home from Portland to Chicago to be with my family for Christmas, Hunter helped me drop off gifts to my nonprofit clients living on their own in subsidized housing. He’d bought a beat-up old car, and we drove all over the city making our holiday rounds. It was so late by the time we got back to my house that we decided to stay up all night; my flight was at the crack of dawn. But as soon as we turned on the movie La Femme Nikita, we were asleep. When we woke up, I’d missed my plane.
I was panicked, but Hunter was calm. He was going to make sure I got on another one, so we jumped in his car. It wouldn’t start. “No problem,” he said, and found us a public bus.
Product details
- Publisher : Crown Pub (14 Jun. 2022)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 302 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0593241053
- ISBN-13 : 978-0593241059
- Dimensions : 14.58 x 2.79 x 21.72 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: 947,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 1,696 in Family & Marriage Biographies
- 4,180 in Marriage
- 4,227 in Marriage Relationships
- Customer reviews:
About the author
Kathleen Buhle has worked on women’s issues in Washington, D.C., for the past decade. She was the director of strategic partnerships at the DC Volunteer Lawyers Project, nonprofit serving domestic violence survivors. Currently, she is the CEO of The House at 1229—which she founded in 2019 as a collaborative space for women leaders—and the development chair for the Ellington Fund.
She is the mother of three daughters: Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy.
Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings, help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.
To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyses reviews to verify trustworthiness.
Learn more how customers reviews work on Amazon-
Top reviews
Top review from United Kingdom
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
Top reviews from other countries
Addiction has casualties. Many marriages don't survive this, friendships are lost, families and finances torn apart.
I don't understand the science, the predisposition. I don't understand why some people can drink and never have an issue while others become substance abusers, and some severe substance abusers. There are many different theories.
There are many different programs and every addict is unique in that their DNA is unique. Don't give up. Please keep fighting for yourself. You are worthy of a wonderful life.
Prayers for everyone out there waging this war.
I cried reading this book, for all involved. Thank you Kathleen for sharing your story. This took guts. Prayers for you and your family. Prayers for your health and for your continued wellness journey.
But my disdain is more for Hallie and their union. The boundaries were so crossed. I would have lost my mind. And although Kathleen does not mention it, Joe Biden sided with that perverse union, forgetting that lines of consanguinity should be honored. Joe Biden should have proclaimed his love for Kathleen and his utter disgust for Hallie and Hunter’s immoral conduct. And poor Beau is turning around in his grave. If Hunter truly loved his brother, he would not have slept with his wife. The thought of it makes me want to scrub my brain with soap.
Kathleen mentioned many things that were familiar to me as someone who grew up around the beltway and raised a family in Columbia, MD. I laughed when she mentioned the C&O canal lock houses/rentals. I saw one that was not inviting. She was a good sport to spend the night in one.
When she wrote about her colon cancer treatment it was nice to see John Marshall’s name. He treated my best friend (secret- he spends Thanksgiving at Churchill Downes). Anyway- I loved the book. I loved that she divorced Hunter. It was good to hear that she is standing tall and has loving people around her.
Buy the book. You will see that Hunter Biden does not deserve someone so nice.