By Betsy Klein, CNN
(CNN) — Jill Biden offered, in her words, a “full-blown confession.”
It was 2020, and she was opening up about the toll Beau Biden’s death took on her family while at a New Hampshire roundtable with mental health professionals.
“For all the tiny gestures the press made so much of, that full-blown confession of how my family had suffered and repressed, repressed and suffered, went entirely unmentioned,” she writes in her new memoir, “View from the East Wing.”
The book, which releases Tuesday, in many ways picks up from the authenticity of that moment — offering a largely unvarnished and, at times, self-aware take on her husband’s time in office, the end of his political career and all of the things and people that rubbed her the wrong way. The former first lady makes it clear, six years later, she is done repressing.
President Donald Trump — whom she names as “Donald” just once and otherwise refers to as “Joe’s opponent,” “the former president” or “the incoming president” — looms large, his effectiveness in undoing her husband’s policies during his second term clearly a continued source of despair for the Biden family.
Throughout the 266-page memoir, Biden weaves the story of the 2020 campaign and her husband’s one-term presidency throughout broader themes of mental health, loss, family and the relationships formed along the way. By the end, it remains clear that Jill Biden is Joe Biden’s most faithful supporter and most trusted adviser, even though she acknowledges that she might be blinded by their nearly half-century of marriage.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the book:
Biden raised concerns about her husband’s urological symptoms before leaving office
This is where the book begins — with the stage IV prostate cancer diagnosis that she says “shocked” her family months after the former president left office.
But Jill Biden, it turns out, long had an inkling something was not right.
“In the year before we left the White House, Joe began waking up repeatedly at night. This symptom, I knew, was common in men his age,” she writes.
She recounts alerting his doctor: “Joe was up seven times last night. … I’m worried about him.”
When the symptoms worsened after leaving the White House, she encouraged her husband to see a Philadelphia urologist, who ultimately gave the diagnosis.
She acknowledges questions about how a US president — who’s protected “in bubble wrap” — didn’t have his advanced cancer detected earlier, and writes that she too was “stunned.” But her attention, she says, quickly turned to supporting her husband through hormone therapy, which, she says, has caused side effects including “fatigue and moodiness.”
As for his age, the former first lady says she believed Joe Biden was “definitely aging” in office but “very much up to the job.”
The Bidens don’t talk about everything
Biden describes herself as an introverted spouse to a very extroverted husband.
And while she paints a deeply trusting relationship, there are still some things the Bidens don’t talk about.
“While it surely sounds old-fashioned that I spoke to the doctors [about his prostate] rather than to Joe directly, it’s always been the nature of our relationship that we’ve maintained a veil of discretion around personal health. When I went t