If We Break

Kathleen Buhle grew up in a working-class family on Chicago's South Side. While volunteering with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Oregon, she fell for Hunter Biden, the son of a senator, and within months she was pregnant and engaged, living a life far removed from anything she had known. She entered the marriage certain that the two of them, committed to each other, could get past any obstacle.

Then Hunter's drinking became a dependency, and Buhle watched her marriage come apart under the pull of addiction and infidelity. As the deceptions piled up beyond repair, she had to face the compromises she had made to keep the marriage alive, and she began to wonder whether she could survive on her own.

In this memoir, Buhle examines why she kept so much hidden, from her daughters and from herself, for so many years, why she came to rely so heavily on one man, and why she held more tightly to a promise of silence than to her own truth. The book is aimed at women who have lost part of who they are and want to recover it.