This memoir. Holy hell. I knew going in that President Biden’s son was a crack addict and an alcoholic. I knew he had had an affair with his beloved brother’s widow. I knew he had impregnated a stripper whom he met in a Washington strip club. I knew that his life had been marked by profound tragedy, losing his mother and sister in a horrifying car crash. But to read all these things in the memoir of a sitting president’s son was mesmerising. This book is a sizzling mess of grief, addiction, self-justification and misdirection. It’s admirable — and also abominable.
In December 1972, just before Christmas, Neilia Biden collided with a tractor at an intersection in Hockessin, Delaware. She was killed along with her one-year-old daughter, Naomi. Her toddler sons, Hunter and Beau, survived. Hunter doesn’t directly attribute his addiction struggles to that trauma but the connection is clear. “What was lost was never recovered,” he writes.
While his father went off to build a career in the US Senate, Hunter and Beau built an almost impossibly close fraternal bond. The relationship between the brothers is the one undeniably beautiful thing in this book, which at its best is a love letter to a lost soulmate. Inseparable throughout their lives, there was one crucial difference between the men: “I drank and Beau didn’t.”
Hunter had already propped up many a bar by the time Beau died from a brain tumour in 2015, aged 46, but things went truly haywire once he lost his stalwart brother. By 2016 Hunter Biden had become Hunter S Thompson, moving his crack dealer, Rhea, into his Washington apartment. “I loved Rhea as much as I ever loved a friend,” he muses.
Later that year he booked himself into one of many rehab sessions, at a retreat in the Arizonan desert. But he missed his plane getting high in the airport car park and embarked on a cataclysmic solo road trip across America. This, he says, is when he gained his “PhD in crackology” as he was chased across the country by the “four horsemen of the crackocalypse” (yes, he actually writes that).
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Constantly chasing his next high, Hunter acquired a “travelling band of vampires” who fed off his credit card and his desperation. In his LA bungalow he learnt how to cook his own crack from an ex-skateboarder named Honda. Things got so bad at one point that a Samoan gangster pulled him aside and told him to get his act together. Yet still there’s a strange braggadocio to Hunter’s recollections. “Jim Morrison was a f***ing piker compared to my shenanigans,” he says, boasting of his drug use. Then came the unnamed child with a stripper, which he glosses over coldly in one sentence as a “mess I’ve taken responsibility for”, and the affair with Beau’s widow, Hallie, which his own wife Kathleen discovered by reading an old iPad. Unmentioned is his alleged relationship with Hallie’s sister, Elizabeth, which was said to have showed up in texts that were leaked during the election.
There’s an important message buried in all this mayhem: the utter joylessness of addiction. The vodka is warm and unmixed, the fiends are nasty and vacuous, and the degradation of smoking cheddar popcorn debris in the hope it might be crack flakes is unforgettable.
The book does have a happy ending — Hunter finds redemption after a coup de foudre with his new wife, Melissa. But Beautiful Things glosses over many key issues. Joe Biden is a strangely distant figure, appearing rarely to provide tangible relief to his lost son. And while Hunter does discuss his controversial employment by Burisma, a Ukrainian gas firm, the scale of his involvement is carefully elided.
Why did Hunter write this chaotic memoir? Perhaps it’s because he truly wants to face down his demons and rebuild his life, but the reported $2 million advance may have played a more central role. Ultimately, for all its revelations, this book does not seem to be honest. I fear that more bumps still lie ahead.
Beautiful Things: A Memoir by Hunter Biden
Gallery UK £20 pp272
