If We Break

July 15, 2022
Hunter Biden's ex-wife takes her turn at the mic. When events in your private life are nonstop, salacious tabloid fodder, there are two equally natural reactions. One is to hide under the biggest rock you can find. The other is to reclaim the narrative by telling it yourself. Buhle's memoir follows Hunter Biden's Beautiful Things, published last year. Tellingly, she plays a relatively small role in his book, while hers focuses solely on their relationship, beginning in 1992 when they met in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and fell madly in love, ending in 2019 on the September day she visited a D.C. courthouse to renounce the famous surname that had defined her for decades. Publishing under her maiden name is an apt metaphor for the reclamation project this book represents. Refreshingly, Buhle relates only what she knows firsthand and avoids exploiting her proximity to fame by leaking insider details that may be irrelevant to her personal story. For example, she calls Michelle Obama, also a Chicago South Sider from a working-class family, an "invaluable friend and inspiration, helping me to own my past and my choices with honesty," but leaves it at that. She even avoids saying much about her sister-in-law, Hallie Biden, who became Hunter's lover after Beau Biden's death. One of the most touching scenes in the book is when Buhle's daughters, who broke into their father's phone, become the ones who bring her the truth of the situation. Quoting David Sheff's insight from Beautiful Boy--"Caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself"--the author is fairly hard on herself in describing the years of paranoia and lurching attempts to regain control that resulted from her husband's addiction. Remarkably lacking in both sensationalism and vengeance, this sad story will be familiar to anyone who has loved an addict.

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