Jill Biden knows people are crazy about her new book.
They are angry that she is only now revealing that she thought her husband, former President Joe Biden, was suffering a stroke during the debate against Donald Trump. He is angry that she publicly praised his debate performance after the fact – “You answered every question! You knew all the facts!” – even though she privately agreed with Joe’s assessment that he had “f—d up.” They are angry that this book criticizing the Democrats in the 2024 presidential election does not exist.
It is not that anyone has expressed that anger on his face.
“But today’s the first day,” she says with a light laugh. “So, who knows what’s going to happen?”
It is Monday morning, the day before the publication of his memoir, “Views from the East Wing.” Very few people have complete information about what the former First Lady has revealed in the book. If they know anything, it comes from the interview clip, which reveals what Jill was thinking when she watched her husband say “something nonsensical about beating up Medicare,” as she writes in the book.
“This is chapter one of 35,” she tells me. “They will see that this is not a political book.” The memoir, she says, is about “an ordinary woman who led an extraordinary life”. About “work-life balance” and the demands of modern womanhood. About her life “as a teacher, as a grandmother, as First Lady.”
“I was a political spouse—I am,” says Jill, 74. “But it wasn’t (told) from that perspective.”
And yet, some people may have difficulty seeing it through someone else. The book is the first account of the Biden administration by the person closest to the president himself. It tells us things we never knew, like the fact that Jill supported the notion that Joe, now 83, should take a cognitive test because she thought he could pass it. There are also details we only heard from one side: For example, Jill confirmed that Vice President Kamala Harris urged Biden to endorse her shortly after his exit, as Harris herself has said about the 2024 race.
These are stories she says she must share to tell her own stories. “This is a reflection of my four years,” she says.
Let’s rewind to that rainy Saturday, July 20, 2024, when President Biden, huddled with his top advisers at the family vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, Del., was wondering whether he should drop out of the presidential race. He was not kept “in a bubble of delusional optimism,” writes Jill, but rather was drowning in a flood of negative headlines about his re-election prospects. From the veranda that afternoon, Biden called for his wife to join him.
“He said, you know, ‘What do you think, Jill? What do you think?'” she recalls in our interview. “I said, ‘No, Joe, I’m not giving you my opinion. That’s a decision you have to make for yourself.'”
That’s how decisions work in the Biden family, she says — despite being one of her husband’s closest advisers, someone who sat in on key political strategy meetings and vetted his vice presidential nominees. “I have always let Joe steer his ship, just as he has always let me steer his ship,” she writes, sometimes disagreeing with each other, but never second-guessing.
She was adamant that she would support him, no matter what his decision was. She was adamant that she was ready for the job. And yet, in the book she expresses doubt – if not in his ability to serve, then in his ability to overcome public beliefs that he could not. In those difficult weeks after the debate, she wondered whether she could trust her doctors, her counselors—or even herself.
“Did he get too old for the job and I didn’t notice?” She writes. “I didn’t think so, but can I be objective enough to be sure?”
Through the book, we come to know that there are many things that Jill Biden did not share with her husband. He did not think he would be able to win the 2020 presidential primaries after a poor early showing – fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire – though he vowed to “support whoever stays in the race as long as they can.” She was concerned about his lack of sleep in the final year of his presidency—waking up seven times a night to go to the bathroom, she notes, which could be a sign of a prostate problem—and she expressed her concerns to Joe’s doctor rather than to Joe because “it has always been the nature of our relationship that we have maintained a veil of discretion around personal health,” she writes.
She knows how it feels. “Old-fashioned,” as she says in the book.
“We kept it separate—it was just the way we grew up,” she says Monday. “I think it’s generational.” Similarly, she never told him about her menopause symptoms – insomnia and night sweats.
Then, of course, there are things he didn’t tell the American public, things that Democrats are now desperate to revisit. She framed those decisions at the time as attempts to “stay out of the fray” – “play by the rules” and “ignore ridiculous attacks.” After the June 2024 debate and the debate that followed, she writes that the “biggest lesson” was that “if you don’t explain something well the question won’t go away.”
She now gets nervous hearing those words read aloud. “I don’t want to sound defensive about what happened in the White House,” she says. “Should we have responded more? I mean, is that the lesson I’ve learned looking back? Maybe. Maybe I should have spoken up a little more, but I don’t know.” There’s a paradox in being First Lady, as Jill writes throughout the book—the risk of becoming too involved in her husband’s presidency or being too careless.
“The one who was a politician was not me,” she says.
But she still wants to express her views. “After we left the White House, a lot of people wrote books,” she says, “so these were my experiences, my thoughts on my years with Joe in the White House.” Her husband’s administration and its achievements have also been praised: “I worry that people will forget what happened next,” she writes.
She titled her memoir after Trump began demolition of the East Wing, the traditional home of the first lady’s offices. Much of the book praises its demise – in particular, the interactive tour displays and the gallery of First Lady portraits that Jill took care to update during her husband’s administration. “I loved the East Wing,” she says Monday. “I loved it.”
She writes something good about every living president and first lady, except Donald and Melania Trump. He says that he has neither read Melania’s book nor seen her documentary. When I asked if she thought about it, she declined to talk. Trump’s health Adequate investigation has been received.
“Oh, I’m not going to talk about that,” says Jill.
In her 2019 memoir, “Where the Light Enters”, Jill compared Joe’s ability to forgive to his propensity for grudges, how she recalls “every little commitment I held against the people I love.” Near the end of her husband’s term, this applied to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who wrote in the book that Jill privately told Biden to leave the race and publicly encouraged him to do so on “Morning Joe” during those fateful weeks in July. “We were friends for 50 years,” he told The Washington Post in January 2025. “It was disappointing.”
She says her husband and former speaker attended Tatiana Schlossberg’s funeral, during the “sign of peace” ritual of the Catholic Mass. Jill herself hasn’t made amends: “I haven’t really seen him socialize or correspond with him. I haven’t even seen him in church,” she says, explaining that she left her seat to shake the former speaker’s hand. Pelosi was not immediately available for comment.
“This is what I’ve learned through this cancer diagnosis,” Jill tells me. “Life’s too short. Why live with the anger and the pain of it? I mean, move on. Let’s move on.”
And now, her husband has cancer: prostate, stage four, has metastasized to his bones. It probably won’t kill him, she writes, but he will never recover. He finished radiation therapy in October. Now, she is on a hormone diet that makes her tired and sometimes moody. Still, he takes Amtrak to his Washington office once or twice a week; He gave a Memorial Day speech in Delaware and will speak at a Democratic event in South Dakota on Friday.
Meanwhile, Jill Milken is president of the Institute Women’s Health Network. She’s still exercising most days and reading books by Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout. She’s taking care of Joe — making sure he schedules his doctor’s appointments and takes his medications — and the family of his granddaughter Naomi, who is visiting from Los Angeles and staying with the Bidens in Delaware for a few weeks. And her children, Ashley and Hunter, have been more present at home in the wake of their father’s diagnosis.
She says of Hunter, “Thank you, God, he has recovered from his addiction and has a new life.”
That new life includes a recent podcast appearance with far-right commentator Candace Owens. It’s a curious choice; Owens once called Hunter, among other things, a “degenerate” and a “crackhead”. Jill hasn’t listened but respects his choice.
“I think it’s something you learn in life,” she continues, laughing. “You can’t control other people, whether you want them to do certain things or don’t want them to do certain things.”
Write to Kara Vogt kara.voght@wsj.com
