KEY POINTS

  • Hunter Biden reveals how his father never let him forget all was not lost
  • He also credits his wife Melissa Cohen for his sobriety 
  • Hunter opens up about doomed relationship with deceased brother's wife Hallie Biden

President Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden has chronicled his harrowing journey through drug addiction, alcoholism and romantic relationship with his deceased brother's wife in his memoir "Beautiful Things: A Memoir" that will hit the shelves on April 6.

In the prologue, Hunter takes the readers through his drug addiction, which led him to cook his own crack cocaine, The New York Times reported.

“I’ve bought crack cocaine on the streets of Washington, D.C., and cooked up my own inside a hotel bungalow in Los Angeles. I’ve been so desperate for a drink that I couldn’t make the one-block walk between a liquor store and my apartment without uncapping the bottle to take a swig. In the last five years alone, my two-decades-long marriage has dissolved, guns have been put in my face, and at one point I dropped clean off the grid, living in $59-a-night Super 8 motels off I-95 while scaring my family even more than myself.”

In the memoir, Hunter also talks about taking his first drink, a glass of champagne, when he was 8 and by 14, he was drinking more. He recounts attending a Mass with a hangover and then throwing up outside during the service.

By 20, he was drinking heavily, he says, while talking about how he lost weight.

“I didn’t eat anything much beyond what was available at the liquor store: Doritos, pork rinds, ramen noodles. Eventually, my stomach couldn’t even handle the noodles.”

He also mentions using a kitchen knife to remove the plastic nub that regulates the flow of vodka from its jug.

“I learned to twist and contort my body in such a way as to lessen the weight of the bottle, to make it more manageable.”

Hunter describes how he bought crack cocaine in Washington from a homeless, middle-aged woman, who later moved in with him.

"I spent a couple of thousand dollars on crack in those first two weeks, with Rhea serving as my conduit," he writes.

By 2018, Hunter was using his "superpower – finding crack anytime, anywhere" in Los Angeles, where he also had a dealer point a gun at his head before realizing he was looking for another hit.

"I never slept. There was no clock. Day bled into night and night into day. I was smoking crack every 15 minutes," Hunter writes.

He fondly describes how his father would support and help him through his travails. "He never let me forget that all was not lost. He never abandoned me, never shunned me, never judged me, no matter how bad things got — and believe me, from there they would get much, much worse.”

Hunter also takes the readers through his romantic and doomed relationship with his deceased brother Beau Biden's wife Hallie Biden.

“Our relationship began as a mutually desperate grasping for the love we had both lost, and its dissolution only deepened that tragedy,” he writes.

This ended Hunter's marriage with his wife Kathleen after she found out about the affair. "That gave her the gift of justification: I was the sicko sleeping with my brother's wife," he writes.

Hallie and Hunter tried living together, but it didn't work. "It was a giant miscalculation on both our parts, errors in judgment born of a uniquely tragic time," the book reads.

He also recounts meeting his second wife Melissa Cohen and credits her with his road to sobriety.

Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden
Joe Biden's son Hunter Biden is pictured. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION