Hunter Biden’s singular memoir of grief and addiction
In September 2020, during the tumultuous first presidential debate between then-President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden, Trump seized on the opportunity to attack a target with a very large bull’s eye: Biden’s son, Hunter. Not only is Biden known to be deeply protective of his family, but Hunter – with his history of substance abuse and service on the board of Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company that played a significant role in Trump’s first impeachment several months earlier – became shorthand for something fishy about the Democratic nominee’s otherwise admirable life. “Hunter got thrown out of the military. He was thrown out, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use,”
Trump said, misrepresenting what had, in fact, happened. Hunter had enlisted in the Navy Reserves, but after a urine test revealed drugs in his system, he was discharged – not dishonorably.
Biden turned these low blows into an opportunity. “My son, my son, my son – like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home – had a drug problem,” Biden said. “He’s overtaken it, he’s fixed it, he’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”
Now the son who inspired that impassioned expression of paternal pride has written “Beautiful Things,” a memoir at once harrowing, relentless and a determined exercise in trying to seize his own narrative from the clutches of the Republicans and the press. The title refers to what he described as his adored older brother’s “mantra” after he had been diagnosed with the deadliest form of brain cancer, glioblastoma. “‘Beautiful things’ became a catchall for relationships and places and moments,” Hunter writes. “We would rock on the porch of our parents’ house and look out at the ‘beautiful things’ spread before us.” But given the trajectory of alcoholism, crack addiction and relationship shredding contained in the next 250 pages, it’s impossible not to see the title burdened by the weight of unintended irony.
The story of the Biden family tragedies are so well known, so woven into the fabric of American political mythology, that one could almost imagine them appearing in a future citizenship test. Which president lost his beautiful young wife and infant daughter in a terrible car accident shortly after he won a long-shot Senate race? What happened to the two sons who were also in that car and miraculously survived? Which one of those sons died when he was only 46? Hunter was the Goofus to his older brother’s Gallant. Beau embodied the decency, rectitude and an impressive public service record comparable to his father’s. Hunter? An apparent hive of dysfunction.
We bring this operatic backstory to the reading of “Beautiful Things,” with Hunter playing the thankless role of a supporting cast member, eclipsed by the greatness of the family’s other men. Addiction was a problem in the Biden family, and Joe and Beau avoided alcohol because of it. Not so for Hunter. There is a special purgatory reserved for the earnest-but-less-talented younger brothers of a superstar – forever admiring, forever inferior and forever judged inadequate.
Those who might turn to this book for effective rehabilitation strategies will be disappointed. Biden spun in and out of recovery options, a host of facilities too numerous to count. What finally worked was falling in love with Melissa Cohen, a multilingual South African “aspiring documentary film maker” whom he married a week after they met and who was determined to clean him up. And finally, he succeeded. But this is hardly a replicable treatment modality.
Clearly, this addiction memoir mattered a lot to Biden, to tell his story and to present himself to the world as the writer he always knew he was. And yet, to make these stories rise to a different level, they require not just the candid chronicling of how-bad-it-got, but also compelling writing that delivers a measure of insight and empathy for others.