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When Hunters first wife hustled a book,she was curiously reticent.

Now we know why......she was warned there’d be no WH wedding ...if she squealed.

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Hunter Biden’s Ex-Wife Gets Candid About What She Learned From Their Marriage
By Alaina Mancini
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KCM/Matt Mendelsohn Photography

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In her revealing new memoir, Kathleen Buhle opens up her ex’s substance abuse issues, their public divorce, and what their relationship is like today.

Kathleen Buhle is in a season of reinvention. After her 24-year-long marriage to Hunter Biden unraveled and ended in divorce in 2017, Buhle (formerly Biden) is coming out on the other side with a renewed sense of self. She’s no longer just President Biden’s former daughter-in-law or the ex-wife of the man at the center of surmounting controversy (including a federal investigation into his international business dealings).

She’s the proud mother of three daughters (Naomi, Finnegan, and Maisy), a colon cancer survivor, and happily divorced. And for the first time, she’s sharing what really happened inside her marriage to Hunter Biden in her new memoir If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction, and Healing.

As she read the finished book, Buhle made an eye-opening discovery. “I realized how scared I was. A 49-year-old college-educated woman, with friends, and a strong family, but who didn’t think she could make it on her own. I felt so bad for her,” says Buhle. “I had to forgive myself for not believing in myself. I believe in myself and I’m proud of myself now. But I’m in my 50s, so that took a long time.”

Buhle wants her adult daughters to learn from her mistakes. “I wish I believed in myself when I was younger, and that’s what I want my girls to do. I want them to believe in themselves and love themselves. Flaws and all. I want us all to feel that way.”

Buhle revealed to us what it was like dealing with her ex’s substance abuse issues, the important lessons the marriage taught her, and why she lived under a blanket of denial for so many years.

KCM: How did the process of writing your memoir help you reclaim power over your life?
Kathleen Buhle: I think being honest with yourself and sitting in a really true place is very powerful. Some of the things I wrote about, like the idea that I gave up all financial control of my life, were hard to acknowledge. I wrote about how I desperately wanted to help my husband stop drinking in his recovery, but I didn’t listen to people tell me I couldn’t force him into his recovery. It was really in writing that out that I realized how much I wasn’t helping him and how much I wasn’t helping myself. Understanding those truths allows me to move on.

Looking back, do you wish you kept track of your family’s finances more?
I very much do and I hope that it’s a lesson that other people are able to take away, too. Whether or not you’re contributing to your household’s finances, it’s your responsibility to understand them. A relationship that has that shared responsibility is a stronger one. I had to admit that putting all of that on my husband wasn’t fair to him and it wasn’t good for me.

You wrote about how difficult it was for you to bring up issues of infidelity and substance abuse to Hunter as they were happening. What made that so hard?
I sat with that for a long time because that was one of the questions that my writing coach asked me: “Why didn’t you say something?” And the title of the book, If We Break, has many meanings for me, but one of them is that I didn’t want to admit that there were cracks. And if you don’t acknowledge them, then you can pretend as if everything’s OK. I lived under a blanket of denial.