Hunter Biden and Barbara Bush on Joe Biden's inauguration day, January 20. WIN MCNAMEE / AFP
Little more remains to be said about Hunter Biden's turbulent personal life.
Even the most lurid and shameful details are known by himself.
If the only son of the president of the United States told
The New York
magazine in 2019 about
his sordid years under the absolutism of alcohol and drugs - just when his father was going to decide to take the leap to bet on the White House-, his last redemption and act of contrition are his memoirs that go on sale this Tuesday in the United States.
Hunter Biden confesses in
Beautiful Things
that his fear of relapse is constant.
“It is my story.
I'm always one step away from making the wrong decision and getting back exactly where I was, ”explains the 51-year-old.
That's what recovery from alcohol and drugs is all about: living in perpetual recovery.
"It never goes away.
It just hides, ”he adds.
The book is a message of the scandalous headlines that the president's son can give if he relapses.
Hunter knows and confesses that his family never gave up on his case.
"There was never a single moment when they didn't try to save me," writes Biden.
If he is alive, he says, it is because of the unwavering love of his line to achieve his salvation.
"I was living in a motel somewhere in Connecticut when my father and mother [Jill, Biden's second wife] told me to go to their house," he says.
“When I entered their home there were my three daughters: Naomi, Finnegan and Maisy, and my niece and nephew, Natalie and Hunter, as well as two therapists.
My immediate reaction was to flee ”, confesses the lawyer licensed by Yale.
“But my father grabbed me, hugged me as hard as he could and said, 'I don't know what to do.'
The meeting is imagined heartbreaking, especially because Hunter Biden recounts in his memoirs that despite knowing that he had all that love, what he really felt was the need for a dose of drugs, a drink of alcohol.
Just over half a decade old, Hunter Biden declares that he bought his first dose of
crack
when he was 18 years old.
His painful passion for alcohol began in high school and turned into alcoholism when he was under 30. Over the past two decades, he has been in and out of rehab on several occasions, and has relapsed each time.
The death of his brother Beau, the family's prodigal son with a promising future in politics, struck him in such a way that the way he found to drown his grief was by maintaining a relationship with his widow.
Both Hunter and Hallie [Beau's wife] had a romantic bond because, according to him, they needed to continue to believe that Beau was with them.
"I was trying madly to hold onto a slice of my brother, and I think Hallie was doing the same," he explains in the 272-page volume.
That relationship ended, although before Hunter Biden asked his father to give them the blessing so that their children would not experience it as a scandal, something that was declared to be proclaimed by the
Page Six
tabloid
when in 2017 he made the relationship public.
Page by page you read the collapse of their marriage, the sinking into hell of the child who, together with his brother, survived at two years of a traffic accident that ended the lives of his mother and sister when they went to buy a tree Christmas in 1972. Joe Biden crowned his conquest of a seat for the nation's Senate and ended up being sworn in in the hospital room where his sons were recovering from their injuries a few weeks after the tragedy.
Biden was successful in many companies, including the Ukrainian Burisma, for which Donald Trump wanted to discredit his father for having favored his son when he was the vice president of Barack Obama.
With Burisma he came to earn $ 50,000 a month.
But Hunter Biden was wasting his gains on his addictions.
When he lived in Washington, he invited a homeless person to live with him in his apartment after buying
crack
.
In Los Angeles, he searched for drugs where not even the police dare to enter.
“I passed by and surrounded people huddled behind pieces of cardboard.
It was completely dark.
All I saw was a gun pointed at my face, "he writes in
Beautiful Things
.
Hunter Biden recalls that there was a time when he was "so desperate for alcohol" that he couldn't walk a street from the liquor store to his house "without uncapping the bottle for a drink."
Hunter Biden is not afraid of harming his father so that he stops loving him.
But he is more than aware of the "immense damage" that has caused him and those who love him.
Hunter Biden ends up recounting in an interview on National Public Radio (NPR, for its acronym in English) that the last and true reason he has written the book is to “give people hope and tell them that there is light, that there is no they have to remain locked up in that prison [of addiction] ”.
Even if there is not a minute of the day when Hunter Biden, in his words, knows that he can descend into the abyss once more.
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