Jill biden autobiography

When I was a child, my grandmother used to tell me in her South Carolinian drawl, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” The refrain captured the idea that good girls like us should project a genteel, unthreatening sweetness, with no hint of our true inner lives. This advice was already dated when she gave it to me in the 1970s. I was born just late enough to more or less ignore it.

Jill Biden was born in 1951. Growing up, she probably heard some version of this saying, too, and she seems to have taken it to heart. Keeping to the blandly nice may be the guiding principle behind her book Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself (2019).

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect a political memoir to be gripping, especially as this one came out on the eve of her husband’s successful run for the presidency. But Jill Biden, as the wife of a US senator, vice-president, and now president, has had a front-row seat to decades of American history—not to mention that an English professor who has taught undergraduate composition for thirty years ought to have a penchant for storytelling.

So I was disappointed that Biden’s own writing is largely unexamined, overly careful, and full of platitudes. (&

•