Biggest Revelations From Jill Biden's Memoir 'View From the East Wing' — Including Her Honest Reaction to Husband Joe Biden's Disastrous Debate Performance

Jill Biden pulled back the curtain on her four years as first lady in her new memoir, View From the East Wing.

Out on June 2, the 74-year-old educator's book chronicled some of the most extraordinary and turbulent chapters of her time in the White House after her husband, Joe Biden, became the 46th U.S. president in 2021.

From Joe's widely criticized debate performance to family health scares and life inside the White House, here are the biggest revelations from Jill's View From the East Wing.

In one part of View From the East Wing, Jill shares she was fired from her teaching job at Northern Virginia Community College when she became first lady. She had taught English and writing at the school since 2009.

Although she signed her annual contract in July 2023, Jill was handed a termination letter signed by the college president that winter. The communication informed her that her role was no longer available because the grant supporting her salary had run out.

"I felt sick," she wrote in the memoir, per ABC News. "I was hosting holiday parties at the White House, so I had to go from seeing emails about my firing to groups of children belting out 'Jingle Bells.'"

The issue was eventually resolved, allowing her to keep her role. She went on to teach her last class at the school in December 2024, bringing her four-decade career as an educator to a close.

As Hunter Biden faced trial in the Delaware gun case in 2024, Joe told reporters he respected the jury's verdict and would not pardon his son.

Jill, on the other hand, was at odds with Joe's initial refusal to pardon Hunter.

"In the end, it felt like in working so hard to be impartial, we guaranteed that Hunter would meet the worst possible legal fate," she penned. "Joe might have gone too far, in my opinion, to show that his family was being treated with complete impartiality."

Weeks before his term officially ended, then-sitting U.S. president granted his son full and unconditional pardon.

In another excerpt obtained by The Atlantic, Jill acknowledged the former POTUS "was definitely aging" in office. She revealed Joe battled "excruciating pain most days" from a foot injury he suffered in November 2020 that never fully healed.

For what it's worth, the then-president-elect sustained hairline fractures in his right foot while playing with Major, one of the Biden family's German shepherds, in November 2020.

Joe's physician, Dr. Kevin O'Connor, said follow-up CT scans detected small fractures to the lateral and intermediate cuneiform bones in the midfoot of the politician's right foot.

Before the CNN-hosted 2024 presidential debate between Biden and Donald Trump, Jill reportedly felt confident the then-incumbent president would do well.

But reality turned out differently.

"I immediately noticed that Joe didn't look good. He didn't seem himself from the opening," Jill wrote.

The former first lady said she wondered if Joe had been drugged or was experiencing a medical emergency on stage, adding, "'Is he short-circuiting?' 'Is this a stroke?' I felt like we were watching an AI hologram of the man we knew, and the hologram was glitching. Has he been drugged?"

Joe appeared to find his footing as the debate progressed but "not enough to reassure [Jill] or anyone watching that he was okay. He clearly wasn't."

She admitted, "I'd never seen that look on his face before in my life."

As Joe walked off the stage following the rocky campaign debate, he reportedly whispered to his wife, "I really f----- up, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did,' I whispered back," Jill responded, according to the book.

At the time, aides and officials maintained Joe was suffering from a cold. On the other hand, Jill admitted she had wondered whether they should have acknowledged the obvious — that Joe "looked very unwell in that debate."

"The biggest lesson for us, I think, was that if you don't explain something well enough then the question won't go away," she wrote. "There was never a satisfying enough explanation offered for Joe's debate performance, and a lot of people never got over it."

According to Jill, she could "barely look" at photos of the East Wing's demolition sent by her friends and colleagues in Washington.

"A major landmark and historic treasure was being treated like an extreme fixer-upper on HGTV's Property Brothers," she wrote in the memoir.

Jill shared that what "pained" her was "the symbolic bulldozing of history and the eradication of institutional memory."

View From the East Wing also detailed Jill's reaction after learning Joe was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer that had spread to his bones. Following the diagnosis, he underwent daily radiation treatments for five and a half weeks and began taking hormone medication, which can cause irritable and fatigued.

"But we couldn't dwell in the grief because we were put immediately on the defensive, accused of having hidden his illness," Jill penned.

Pushing back on suggestions the diagnosis was concealed, Jill explained the White House has a dedicated medical unit and access to top specialists, making it nearly impossible to hide a serious health issue.

"Joe couldn't stub his toe without 10 people wanting to run at him waving bales of gauze," she added. "You put the president in bubble wrap, and he ends up with stage IV prostate cancer? It made no sense."