Growing Up Biden: A Memoir Book Review

You can learn a lot about someone by listening to those who know them best.

Valerie Biden Owens, is among other things, the younger sister of President Joe Biden. Three years younger than her big brother, she tells her story in the new memoir, Growing Up Biden: A Memoir. Born into a close-knit and loving Irish-Catholic family, she is the second child and only daughter. Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, she was not subject to the same rules that separated boys and girls in the era.

After graduating college, she became a surrogate mother to her nephews after her sister-in-law and baby niece was killed in a car accident. Marrying for the second time in the mid-1970s, she has become a force to be reckoned with and a groundbreaker in the modern feminist era.

For fifty years, she has been her brother’s political advisor, sounding board, and someone he can rely on through thick and thin.

Reading this book reminded me of why I voted for Biden in the first place. Despite his political imperfections, he is a man who believes in this country, and its possibilities, and is willing to do the work that is needed to move the nation forward.

The one thing that has stayed with me is her stance on abortion. I won’t give it away if you have not read the book, but I will say that her experience matches the stories that other women have had in regard to the subject.

Do I recommend it? Absolutely.

Growing Up Biden: A Memoir is available wherever books are sold.

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