That’s on me. That’s on all of us.
Then there is this:
I’m also an alcoholic and a drug addict. I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, DC, and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig. In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.
That deep descent came not long after I hugged my brother, Beau, the best friend I’ve ever had and the person I loved most in the world, as he took his last breath. Beau and I talked virtually every day of our lives. While we argued as adults almost as much as we laughed, we never ended a conversation without one of us saying, “I love you,” and the other responding, “I love you, too.”
After Beau died, I never felt more alone. I lost hope.
I’ve since pulled out of that dark, bleak hole. It’s an outcome that was unthinkable in early 2019. My recovery never could have happened without the unconditional love of my father and the everlasting love of my brother, which has carried on after his death.
The love between me and my father and Beau—the most profound love I’ve ever known—is at the heart of this memoir. It’s a love that allowed me to continue these last five years in the midst of both personal demons and pressure from the outside world writ large, including a president’s unhinged fury.
It’s a Biden love story, of course, which means it’s complicated: tragic, humane, emotional, enduring, widely consequential, and ultimately redemptive. It carries on no matter what. My dad has often said that Beau was his soul and I am his heart. That about nails it.
I thought of those words often as they related to my life. Beau was my soul, too. I’ve learned that it’s conceivable to go on living without a soul as long as your heart is still beating. But figuring out how to live when your soul has been ripped from you—when it has been so thoroughly extinguished that you find yourself buying crack in the middle of the night behind a gas station in Nashville, Tennessee, or craving the tiny liquor bottles in your hotel minibar while sitting in a palace in Amman with the king of Jordan—well, that’s a more problematic process.
There are millions of others still living in the dark place where I was, or far worse. Their circumstances might be different, their resources far fewer, but the pain, shame, and hopelessness of addiction are the same for everyone. I lived in those crack motels. I spent time with “those” people—rode with them, scoured the streets with them, got high as a fucking kite with them. It left me with an overwhelming empathy for those struggling just to make it from one moment to the next.
Yet even in the depths of my addiction, when I washed up in the most wretched places, I found extraordinary things. Generosities were extended to me by people society considers untouchables. I finally understood how we are all connected by a common humanity, if not also by a common Maker.
Mine is an unlikely résumé for this sort of confession. Believe me, I get it. Yet as desperate, dangerous, and lunatic as that résumé often is, it also teems with basic, affirming connections.
I want those still living in the black hole of alcoholism and drug abuse to see themselves in my plight and then to take hope in my escape, at least so far. We’re all alone in our addiction. It doesn’t matter how much money you have, who your friends are, the family you come from. In the end, we all have to deal with it ourselves—first one day, then another one, and then the next.
And I want to illuminate, with honesty and humility and not just a little awe, how family love was my only effective defense against the many demons I ran up against.
Writing this book wasn’t easy. Sometimes it was cathartic; other times it was triggering. I’ve pushed away from my desk more than once while putting down thoughts about my last four years wandering the wilderness of alcoholism and crack addiction—memories too breathtaking, too disturbing, or still too close not to give me pause. There were times when I literally trembled, felt my stomach clench and my forehead perspire in too-familiar ways.
When I was not quite a year sober, as I worked on the early parts of this book, crack remained the first thing I thought about every morning when I woke up. I became like some feverish war reenactor, meticulously going through the rituals of my addiction, pathetic step by pathetic step—minus the drug, and with Melissa asleep beside me. I reached an arm over to the side table next to the bed and fumbled around for a piece of crack. I imagined finding one, then imagined inserting it into a pipe, drawing it to my lips, igniting it with a lighter, and then experiencing the sensation of complete and utter well-being. It was the most alluring, most enticing…
Then I’d catch myself and stop. Melissa would awaken and a new day, free from all that, would begin. My dad would call from a primary stop in Iowa or Texas or Pennsylvania. My oldest daughter would call from law school in New York, asking me again if I’d read
