VIEW FROM THE EAST WING: A Memoir, by Jill Biden
So trim, toned and beatific that it seems to have emerged from her favorite morning SoulCycle class, Jill Biden’s second memoir, “View From The East Wing,” rests on simple details.
The cotton balls used to simulate snow at the White House’s 2022 holiday celebration. The chicken parm and pasta that the Bidens eat on special occasions. The family tabby, Willow, finding sunbeams at the Rehoboth Beach dwelling that Joe refused to buy until, “Finally” — his wife lapsing into italics with the affectionate exasperation familiar to anyone in a longtime domestic partnership — he “had looked at every house on the market.”
The general vibe is more popovers in Woman’s Day than popping off in Politico.
Along with being a former first and second lady of the United States, Biden is a longtime English professor who casually uses the correct group noun for starlings (“murmuration”). She quotes many writers here — Albert Camus, Robert Frost, Nikki Giovanni, James Salter — but the author the book recalled most vividly to me, in its careful catalog of small details, was William Carlos Williams, who in his epic poem “Paterson” wrote “no ideas but in things.”
This tracks, because Biden acknowledges the help of Ada Calhoun, the author of “Also a Poet,” about Frank O’Hara.
Indeed, Biden’s description of being hustled for security reasons through the service entrance to hotels made my O’Hara stand on end, so cleanly could it be broken into stanzas, if you’ll forgive the liberty: “right by garbage cans/ reeking of rotting room service leftovers/mixed with discarded mini shampoos/ — an odor so sour and pungent/that it almost knocks you down.”
The book’s title is also pungent, and pointed: the East Wing of the White House, which contained the first lady’s office, a visitor center and several other historical chambers, was demolished last year by her husband’s successor, Donald J. Trump, to make way for a ballroom.
“The innards of the East Wing were spread out for everyone to see,” Biden recalls mournfully of watching the wrecking ball, “like a rare and precious animal that had been hunted down and killed.”
A wish to restore the historical record, more than settle any score, appears to be what’s rattling her keyboard, though she does remind us that Trump mined a rare photo of her in conversation with him to advertise his cologne, Fight! Fight! Fight! (“Really?”) and notes that Melania Trump refused her invitation to a transitional tea.
She marvels at the perks of the office, the masses of flowers, attentive staff and fine art, such as “Morning on the Seine, Good Weather,” the oil painting that Angela Merkel said Trump called “my Monet.” (“Our Monet,” Biden corrects, meaning the American people’s.)
But she also notes also the office’s absurdities, like having to relinquish a brooch made out of bomb shrapnel from Ukraine after the State Department appraised it at $14,063 — well above the foreign gift limit, then $480.
Of course “View From the East Wing,” leaking like a geyser into The New York Post but officially coming out next Tuesday, must address the biggest elephants in the room, such as the disastrous debate performance that led to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, for which his wife has no explanation but that he was over-coached or tired.
“I really f*cked up, didn’t I?” she writes he whispered to her coming off the stage.
“Yes, you did.”
At the time, she thought he might be having a stroke. “It felt like we were watching an A.I. hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching,” she writes. “Has he been drugged? Oh God — will people assume this is how he is all the time?”
Two weeks before the debate, Hunter, the Bidens’ younger son, whose louche binges and loose ways with a laptop did their campaign no favors, was found guilty on three felony gun counts.
At the trial, as relatives sobbed, a bewildered and brokenhearted Jill “concentrated on not showing any emotion at all,” she writes in a day-by-day account, suggesting something fishy about the ex-girlfriend who photographed Hunter with drugs “almost as if she were filming a nature documentary.” Further tax convictions would follow; President Biden pardoned him before leaving office.
“Time is a storm in which we are all lost,” Williams wrote. “Only inside the convolutions of the storm itself shall we find our directions.”
The Bidens have been buffeted by stronger winds than most. They married after his first wife, Neilia, and their daughter Naomi died in a car accident in 1972. Beau Biden, the couple’s oldest son, succumbed to a malignant brain tumor at 46 in 2015, which both Joe and Jill wrote about tenderly in previous memoirs. This one is more like blinking in a backyard after a twister or two has torn through.
“The thing about grief is that it veils one’s face,” Biden writes, of visiting war zones. “It’s like a haze has descended. The tears of mothers stay permanently on the edges of their eyes, as if they can hardly contain their sadness.”
Barely six months after President Biden’s anointed successor, Kamala Harris, lost the 2024 election — Jill is measured but warm about her — he was diagnosed with cancer: prostate, Stage 4, metastasized to the bones.
Now a kind of nurse, astonished to be 74 and friends with a mahjong enthusiast, Biden marvels at that opinion piece by Joseph Epstein in The Wall Street Journal, calling her “kiddo” and mocking the “Dr.” honorific, in educational leadership, she earned in 2007. (No one picked on William Carlos Williams for writing poetry when he was also a very busy pediatrician.)
A doctor Jill Biden most definitively is. A spin doctor — not really.
VIEW FROM THE EAST WING: A Memoir | By Jill Biden | Gallery Books | 288 pp. | $32
