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Where the Light Enters by Jill Biden: book review



 Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself  (2019) is the autobiography of Jill Biden, married to American vice-president Joe Biden – and now president-elect.

Jill Jacobs begins her autobiography at the age of twelve in Philadelphia, growing up the oldest of five girls in an Italian family. She writes of the Vietnam war years, the feminist revolution, rock-and-roll, and her new husband, Bill Stevenson. 

 

Joe Biden was married to Neilia Hunter at the time with three children: Beau, Hunter, and Naomi. Neilia and Naomi died in a car accident in 1972. Jill divorced Bill in 1975, married Joe Biden in 1977, and they had a daughter Ashley in 1981. 

 

This book focuses on how Jill met, married, and began a family with Joe Biden. And why it took five proposals before she agreed to marry him. It wasn’t just the pressure of a public life and all the scrutiny it would entail, there were family dynamics to consider, and her career.

 

Like any mother, Jill Biden discusses the routines of raising Beau and Hunter, and then bringing Ashley into the home as Joe rose in his career from senator to Barak Obama’s vice-president. With public life came the ‘work family’ of staff, the ‘military family’ of the service men and women, and the ‘media family’ of interviewers, photographers, and reporters, without ignoring the family of friends. 

 

Halfway into the book, Jill Biden is on the campaign trail when Joe launched his first campaign to run for the position of president in 1987, and again in 2008, before nominee Barak Obama selected him for vice-president. At the same time, she continues her career and her studies.

 

Jill Biden (1951-) was Second Lady from 2008-2016 during the Obama-Biden administration in the White House. She was the only Second Lady to have a full-time job, keeping her job as an educator. On January 20, 2021, she will become the First Lady after her husband’s inauguration. 

 

Throughout the book, Jill Biden focuses on family and not political life. She mentions Joe’s aneurysm in 1988, the death of Beau in 2015 from brain cancer, the onset of grandchildren, and the traditions of the Biden family. It is straight-forward and honest, and provides a solid background to the important factors in the Bidens’ lives. 








 

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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