Takeaways from Jill Biden’s new memoir

By Betsy Klein, CNN

(CNN) — Jill Biden offered, in her words, a “full-blown confession.”

It was 2020, and she was opening up about the toll Beau Biden’s death took on her family while at a New Hampshire roundtable with mental health professionals.

“For all the tiny gestures the press made so much of, that full-blown confession of how my family had suffered and repressed, repressed and suffered, went entirely unmentioned,” she writes in her new memoir, “View from the East Wing.”

The book, which releases Tuesday, in many ways picks up from the authenticity of that moment — offering a largely unvarnished and, at times, self-aware take on her husband’s time in office, the end of his political career and all of the things and people that rubbed her the wrong way. The former first lady makes it clear, six years later, she is done repressing.

President Donald Trump — whom she names as “Donald” just once and otherwise refers to as “Joe’s opponent,” “the former president” or “the incoming president” — looms large, his effectiveness in undoing her husband’s policies during his second term clearly a continued source of despair for the Biden family.

Throughout the 266-page memoir, Biden weaves the story of the 2020 campaign and her husband’s one-term presidency throughout broader themes of mental health, loss, family and the relationships formed along the way. By the end, it remains clear that Jill Biden is Joe Biden’s most faithful supporter and most trusted adviser, even though she acknowledges that she might be blinded by their nearly half-century of marriage.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the book:

Biden raised concerns about her husband’s urological symptoms before leaving office

This is where the book begins — with the stage IV prostate cancer diagnosis that she says “shocked” her family months after the former president left office.

But Jill Biden, it turns out, long had an inkling something was not right.

“In the year before we left the White House, Joe began waking up repeatedly at night. This symptom, I knew, was common in men his age,” she writes.

She recounts alerting his doctor: “Joe was up seven times last night. … I’m worried about him.”

When the symptoms worsened after leaving the White House, she encouraged her husband to see a Philadelphia urologist, who ultimately gave the diagnosis.

She acknowledges questions about how a US president — who’s protected “in bubble wrap” — didn’t have his advanced cancer detected earlier, and writes that she too was “stunned.” But her attention, she says, quickly turned to supporting her husband through hormone therapy, which, she says, has caused side effects including “fatigue and moodiness.”

As for his age, the former first lady says she believed Joe Biden was “definitely aging” in office but “very much up to the job.”

The Bidens don’t talk about everything

Biden describes herself as an introverted spouse to a very extroverted husband.

And while she paints a deeply trusting relationship, there are still some things the Bidens don’t talk about.

“While it surely sounds old-fashioned that I spoke to the doctors [about his prostate] rather than to Joe directly, it’s always been the nature of our relationship that we’ve maintained a veil of discretion around personal health. When I went through menopause, I never spoke about it with him, even though I experienced two years of horrible insomnia,” she writes.

When it comes to issues and policy, she recounts encouraging her husband to “widen his circle of advisers” and weighing in on conflicts like the Israel-Hamas war.

Biden also reflects on being a partner to a president — a role that includes “(sitting) with people having the worst day of their life.”

That included the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, which she calls a “turning point for Joe’s administration.” When they met with families of the 13 US service members killed at the Kabul airport in August 2021, she says it was “the first time we went into a group of military families and were met not as friends but, by some, as enemies.”

Jill Biden knew the debate was bad

Biden doesn’t sugarcoat her husband’s abysmal performance at a June 2024 CNN presidential debate. When she arrived at their hotel that afternoon, she remembers thinking, “Joe looked bleary.” And after makeup? “He looked like he was made of clay, strangely monochromatic.”

She reveals her inner monologue during the debate: “Is he short circuiting? … Is this a stroke? … Was he having a medical emergency?” Nearly two years later, she writes, “I still don’t know what happened,” adding that she regrets not asking for bloodwork.

She questions her strategy of staying positive after her husband’s performance.

“My comments probably sounded a little too disconnected from what people saw. I wonder if, from those very first moments after the debate, we were trying so hard to reassure everyone that we didn’t take the time to acknowledge that he looked very unwell in that debate, to say to the public: ‘Yes. That was bad, no doubt.’”

And she concedes that the campaign did not offer sufficient explanations to make questions about the president’s health go away.

She left a hidden message for the Trumps

Biden writes sometimes obliquely, sometimes matter-of-factly about Trump, whom she describes at one point as “some kind of avenging spirit” as he prepared to return to office.

She says she is repeatedly stopped in public by “people telling me horror stories” about his presidency — from their experience losing federal employment to the cost of eggs.

She subtly extolls the power of USAID and soft diplomacy “to remind countries that the United States is a valuable friend” while taking aim at Trump’s decision to hang a portrait of an autopen in place of her husband as “too absurd to even dignify.”

And she criticizes Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing, home to first ladies for decades, to make way for his sprawling ballroom project.

“A major landmark and historic treasure was being treated like an extreme fixer-upper on HGTV’s Property Brothers,” she writes.

She also hints that she left a hidden message for the Trumps, written with her finger in steam on the window of the White House residence, on the morning of Inauguration Day — but declined to share what it said.

Hunter Biden’s struggles tested her

Jill Biden expresses regret for not discussing Hunter Biden’s addiction with the family sooner — until his daughters asked for help staging an intervention.

“I was raised to stay stoic and contained. Regardless of how bad it looked, I believed that Hunter would get it together on his own. That’s something I regret now, not having tried sooner to talk about it. A lot of people knew how dire the situation had become, but they didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask,” she said.

And yet, she still holds the experience at arm’s length.

“Even now, I can barely say the words ‘My son was a drug addict.’ Barely,” she writes.

“Many people have asked why I never took on addiction as a cause as First Lady. I couldn’t. I really don’t have any answers, even though I deeply empathize with those who love people struggling with addiction,” she adds.

As for Hunter Biden’s legal woes, including the trial that resulted in his conviction on three felony gun charges, she questions the politics of being part of the first family. “Joe might have gone too far, in my opinion, to show that his family was being treated with complete impartiality,” she writes.

Her husband, she later writes, “made the call” to pardon Hunter Biden, despite protest from some advisers. She supported that decision.

What emerges is a picture of a former first lady learning to accept, and show, her feelings.

“For the most part, I’ve been able to hold myself together, moving forward without letting anyone see when I’m in pain. … I used to think my way was the healthier path. Now I’m not so sure,” she writes.

The role of first lady is ‘a catch-22’

Biden speaks fondly about her relationships with others who’ve held the roles of first or second lady, including Hillary Clinton and Karen Pence, along with her counterparts abroad.

Her relationship with former Vice President Kamala Harris appears more complicated. It notably got off on a difficult foot after what Biden described as “hypocritical point-scoring” during a 2019 Democratic debate. And even though Biden calls her the “clear” choice for running mate, the former first lady seems stung by Harris quickly pressing her husband for an endorsement when he was preparing to end his reelection bid.

Harris’ husband, Doug Emhoff, Biden adds, was “a real person, a gift that at times in Washington can feel like a life raft on the ocean.”

Throughout the book, Biden muses on the role of a first lady and questions some of its constraints.

“Being first lady could feel like a catch-22,” she writes “You were encouraged to use your platform to do good, but not to be too aggressive in pursuing policy goals, lest you be seen as overreaching. If you knew too little about what you were talking about, then you were an embarrassment. If you knew too much, you were trying to rule the world.”

She took a no-frills stance on some of the perks of the job. She writes about abandoning “the tradition of having an usher ride in the elevator with me to push the button” and brewing her own coffee, but she seems to have enjoyed visits to Camp David and artwork by Claude Monet in their private living space.

And as the first first lady to hold a full-time job while in office, she writes about how teaching English at a nearby community college informed her role.

“Being on campus grounded me, and helped me stay in touch with what real people were dealing with in a way that can be hard if you’re in a White House bubble,” she writes.

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