That was the entirety of our social life, except for the potlucks with people from school that we held regularly at our apartment. We were the only couple, it seemed, that had a kid.
I worked like hell. The day after the spring semester’s last final exam, I started the first of two eight-week summer internships for two different law firms in Chicago. I’d return to school a week late in the fall so that I could earn that one extra paycheck. The money I made during those sixteen weeks was what we lived on the rest of the year.
After I received my law degree in 1996, we moved back to Wilmington. I joined my father’s Senate reelection bid as a deputy campaign manager, while also getting a job in the executive management training program at MBNA America, a leading credit card company that has since been acquired by Bank of America. Beau was working in Washington for the U.S. Department of Justice, and soon became a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia.
Being a corporate lawyer was the antithesis of what I’d thought I’d be doing. But I had $160,000 in student loans from college and law school, a burgeoning family, and no savings. Whether I made money from a law firm or a bank didn’t make much difference to me: I had to make money.
Much like when I turned down the chance to get an MFA at Syracuse, I felt like I had no choice. In part, it was the fear of the unknown. In my mind, I couldn’t afford to work for the Justice Department or as a public defender. Obviously, people who have families and debts get by on those salaries every day. What I didn’t realize until later is that whatever I made wouldn’t pay enough for what Kathleen and I thought we wanted.
The first things we did were buy a house, get a decent car, and put Naomi in private school. It wasn’t lavish, but we were on our way to establishing a lifestyle that’s difficult to turn back from. Every decision I made after that was based on how to maintain what I had and how to make more. One private school tuition would turn into three, one car into two, the $300,000 mortgage into a $1 million mortgage. I kept climbing the escalator and didn’t know how to get off.
That year after law school, we bought a big, run-down pre–Revolutionary War redo. It had been used as a boardinghouse/frat house for ten dudes between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. When we moved in, a refrigerator with a hole drilled through the door for the tap from a beer keg still stood in the living room. There was a pool table in the dining room. Kathleen, Beau, Dad, and I, along with a bunch of friends, went to work on restoring it—much like Dad had done with the house we grew up in. We put in new plumbing ourselves, gutted the bathroom. We tore out walls, redid floors. We scraped, caulked, primed, and repainted every square inch of the place.
Beau moved into the third floor while I covered the mortgage. Everybody we knew convened at our house. In 1998, Kathleen and I had our second daughter, Finnegan, and before long Beau started dating a dark-haired, blue-eyed woman we’d known growing up named Hallie Olivere.
We flipped the house for about twice what we paid for it. I had more money in the bank than any Biden in six generations. I helped my brother pay off his student loans. I left MBNA and got a job at the U.S. Department of Commerce as executive director for e-commerce policy. We moved to Washington and enrolled Naomi at Sidwell Friends, one of the city’s most exclusive schools. The tech bubble burst not long afterward, temporarily putting a damper on e-commerce policy, so I started my own law firm/lobbying shop. I eventually worked mostly on behalf of Jesuit universities and hospitals.
Not long after our third daughter, Maisy, was born in 2000, we moved back to Delaware to be closer to family. I kept my firm in DC, started to drink more heavily after work, and missed the last train to Wilmington more and more often. I was a functional alcoholic—I always could drink five times more than anyone else—but now I was staying overnight, not making it home in time to take the kids to school in the morning.
I tried to quit drinking when we returned to Washington, in 2003. I’d stop for thirty days, then binge for three. I couldn’t get control of it.
I knew what I did and did not want. I wanted to build a successful business. I wanted to get my brother elected attorney general. I wanted to run a marathon, do a triathlon. I wanted to write a book and to paint. I did not want to be an absent father. I did not want to have a partnership with Kathleen in which drinking became the fault line between us.
Later that year, with Kathleen unsure of what to do, I admitted myself into the Crossroads Centre, a residential rehab program in Antigua. Founded five years earlier by Eric Clapton, Crossroads follows a twelve-step approach modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous. I stayed there for a month. It worked.
Despite its celebrity-musician roots and Caribbean setting, Crossroads was nice but no-frills. A one-story building above the water with about twenty rooms, it offers scholarships to those who can’t afford the program and admits anyone who lives on the island for free. There are no daily massages or trips to the market. There are no phones or computers. Everybody has a roommate, makes his own bed, does his own laundry, helps with chores.
I didn’t know what
