Hunter Biden

Readers know Kathleen Buhle better as Kathleen Biden, the long-suffering wife of Hunter, the brother who wasn't Beau but who took up with his widow.

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. There are constant trivialities about how handsome Hunter looks in a suit and exchanges of “I love you” between the couple. Buhle notes that the home was “often behind on its upkeep, and whole sections were closed to save on heating costs.” 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. In Buhle’s telling, the family is close, supportive and spends plenty of time together but is not very open. 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. 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. 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. “Hunter told me he was going for the yoga workshops,” she explains of a trip he took to Big Sur. “Did I believe him? Subtitled “A memoir of marriage, addiction, and healing,” the book is short on healing, while the addiction and masochism never appear to end. 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.