On Friday, The Washington Post published a book review of Kathleen Buhle’s memoir about being married to Hunter Biden. But Post writer Karen Heller didn’t like the book — or the audience she thinks is interested in it.
She warned “And obsessive Hunter gatherers out there, be warned, the book contains nary a mention of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma or the infamous laptop left at the Delaware repair shop.” Keller joked:
Instead of matching towels, we have his-and-her memoirs.
Subtitled “A memoir of marriage, addiction, and healing,” the book is short on healing, while the addiction and masochism never appear to end. After Hunter’s fifth — or was it sixth? — visit to rehab, Buhle still accepts his lies.
So Kathleen is a sap. She’s so dumb she can’t even see Hunter cheated with his brother’s widow, and that is recounted in the awful anti-Biden press. “The affair goes public in the New York Post, the tabloid that will turn Hunter’s lobbying exploits and role as a Burisma board member into something of a full-time beat.”
There’s zero shame that ahem, The Washington Post has made the Trump family’s finances a full-time beat.
Keller concluded with the notion that no one should really want to read this book. It’s just so tremendously inconvenient for the Bidens:
This is the ex of a politician’s now-notorious son, a woman who claims no desire to be famous, guards her privacy, then publishes a memoir at precisely the moment when her former father-in-law is at the height of his power. Perhaps the experience provides some catharsis and revenue for Buhle, who leads a D.C. collaborative space for women and assists nonprofits. Perhaps it may offer solace for others in emotionally abusive relationships with alcoholics. But is this really a book the public is asking to read?
This is a very partisan question. After all, Heller thought Hollywood feminist Lena Dunham’s memoir was worthwhile even if her sex-assault allegations “defy verification.”
The his-and-hers Biden memoirs were not treated equally. For Hunter’s memoir, the Post assigned a review to Marianne Szegedy-Maszak of Mother Jones, who praised Joe Biden for his decency and rectitude and stuff: “Hunter was the Goofus to his older brother’s Gallant. Beau embodied the decency, rectitude and an impressive public service record comparable to his father’s. Hunter? An apparent hive of dysfunction.”
At least Szegedy-Maszak ruled that Hunter’s memoir lacked a convincing empathy for everyone he’s made to suffer. But in the end, she came around to feeling his pain:
“My dad has often said that Beau was his soul and I am his heart,” Biden writes. There’s a lot of pain in that observation. A soul is eternal, soaring, the purest and most invulnerable part of our being. The heart? A fragile organ, and one that can be broken.