The Bidens are a Nantucket family, but on Thursday former First Lady Jill Biden traveled to Martha’s Vineyard to give a talk about her new memoir, View from the East Wing.
Ms. Biden best-selling book chronicles her time in the White House with former President Joe Biden from 2021 to 2025. She spoke to a nearly sold-out crowd at the high school's performing arts center as part of the Martha’s Vineyard Author Series.
Sunny Hostin of The View moderated the conversation, which also honored Teagan D’Arcy, a 2026 graduate of MVRHS, who won a Vineyard Gazette-sponsored youth essay contest for writing about what community means to her.
Ms. Biden’s first memoir, Where the Light Enters, details her youth, meeting Joe Biden and learning to navigate the political and personal aspects of their lives. View from the East Wing picks up where her previous book leaves off, focusing specifically on the family’s time in the White House.
“I thought, I want to tell my story, I want to tell my reflections, and I don’t want to wait, because I want to remember everything,” she said.
She described the East Wing, which the Trump administration demolished last fall, as a magical place, where families came to learn about American history and White House chefs prepared delicious meals.
But private the East Wing was not. Secret service tracked the family’s every move, referring to them with code names. Ms. Biden was “Capri” and Mr. Biden was “Celtic.”
“It’s really kind of like a fishbowl,” she said.
Ms. Biden’s diplomatic duties as First Lady were extensive. She built relationships (and SoulCycled) with the world’s most powerful leaders and supported reproductive health care, military families and cancer research.
Meanwhile, she was still holding down an English teaching job at Northern Virginia Community College, making her the only First Lady in U.S. history to have a day job outside of White House duties.
She recalled her staff asking her: Why don’t you just volunteer instead, like Eleanor Roosevelt?
“I said no, I’m going to teach, and so you guys better figure it out,” Ms. Biden said.
The normalcy of a community college teaching job contrasted sharply with the pressures of one of the most public and demanding jobs in the world.
These pressures collided with familial concern at Mr. Biden’s 2024 debate against President Donald Trump, where he made headlines for looking unwell and speaking incoherently.
“I was scared to death, and I thought, oh my God, he’s having a stroke,” she said.
It was a moment that also raised the public’s concern, triggering an onslaught of calls to drop out of the race from Democratic Party heavyweights. In Ms. Biden’s view, her husband was fit to lead, but public pressure prevailed. Mr. Biden left the race that summer, clearing the way for his vice president, Kamala Harris, to assume the candidacy.
“I know historians will probably write about it until the end of time, but I still can honestly say I don’t know what happened,” Ms. Biden said. “I never, ever saw Joe like that, before or after [the debate].”
But as of late, Mr. Biden’s health journey has been a difficult one, she said. After leaving office, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that metastasized to his bones, for which he’s still in treatment.
“Not a day goes by that I’m not on the phone with one doctor or another,” she said.
She also opened up about their son Beau Biden’s death from glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, in 2015, and their son Hunter Biden’s struggle with drug addiction.
Though Hunter is now in recovery, reading aloud the word “addict” while taping the audiobook version of her memoir hurt, Ms. Biden said.
“I had to say the words, my son was, is, a drug addict,” she said. “I cried. They had to stop the taping. It took me a while to get myself together. It’s a hard thing for a parent to say.”
The memoir also chronicles Hunter’s highly-scrutinized federal court trial where he was convicted of three felony charges related to his purchase of a gun while he was actively using drugs. While Mr. Biden initially insisted he would not grant Hunter a presidential pardon, he changed his mind when it became clear how politics could impact his son’s sentencing.
“He was adamant in the beginning that he was not going to pardon Hunter, and then when [President Trump] was elected... we saw how vindictive he was going to be,” she said.
Though the View from the East Wing exposes these vulnerabilities, some have criticized Ms. Biden for not being forthcoming enough. Publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Times have published reviews suggesting that the book presents a version of events that airbrushes, for example, the former President’s health and mental capabilities.
Ms. Hostin alluded to these criticisms.
“Some readers have noted what is absent from this book as much as what is present,” she said. “Certain difficult episodes often get little space.”
When Ms. Biden asked Ms. Hostin to be more specific, she pointed out that the book grants little air time to President Trump, simply referred to in the book as “the other candidate.”
“Why would I talk about him?” Ms. Biden replied. “It’s my book.”
At the end of the discussion, Ms. Hostin asked Ms. Biden a few pre-submitted questions from the audience. One was from an 11-year-old Chilmarker named Margaret. She requested advice for her older brother, 14, who hopes to someday be President of the United States.
“Run,” Ms. Biden said. “And you can take that any way you want.”
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