One of the most talked-about revelations buried in former first lady Jill Biden’s new memoir, “View from the East Wing,” which arrives on June 2, 2026, concerns Princess Kate. The Biden camp began previewing the book through an excerpt published May 29, offering the first glimpse into her account of the years spent beside Joe Biden in the White House. While the memoir spans her entire tenure as first lady, one particular section — passed along by People magazine — has already become the part everyone is reading first.
The advice came at a primary school in west Cornwall in June 2021, on Jill Biden’s first foreign trip as first lady. She and Kate had been cooing over rabbits with the children at Connor Downs Academy in Hayle. Kate mentioned she liked to draw and paint. Jill, the longtime English teacher, told her that wasn’t enough.
“I encouraged her to keep a journal about her experiences. She said she liked to draw and paint, but I said you can never have too many ways to privately express your feelings,” Biden writes in the excerpt published ahead of the release.
A Cornwall Reception and a Quiet Confession
Before the school visit, there was a cocktail reception tied to the G7 Summit in Cornwall, held inside the Eden Project’s rainforest and Mediterranean biodomes. Queen Elizabeth was there. So was King Charles, then the Prince of Wales. So was Queen Camilla, who told Jill Biden she was relieved to see another spouse her own age — most of the others, she said, were younger. Biden joked that they were probably the only two in the room who had been Beatles fans while the band was still together.
Then came the part that stops you. Prince Philip had died in April 2021, two months before the reception, at 99. The queen, Biden writes, told Joe Biden that her husband never wanted to live to be 100. He had called it “too old.”
That detail — a private remark from a widow of weeks — sits in the book without much commentary around it. Biden moves on.
Tea at Windsor, and an Honest Queen
The Bidens were warned before visiting Windsor Castle for tea: don’t bring up family, don’t bring up Philip. Biden writes that she “studiously did not ask the queen about her husband or anything related to the royal family.” She didn’t have to. Elizabeth brought it up herself, ticking through her 11 great-grandchildren and the one on the way. That 12th great-grandchild arrived in September 2021 — Sienna Elizabeth Mapelli Mozzi, daughter of Princess Beatrice and Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi.
Biden writes that the queen was sharper and more candid than she expected. She gossiped, mildly, about foreign leaders she didn’t think much of. Biden doesn’t name them.
Of Kate, Biden was warmer still. “When Princess Kate and I cooed over rabbits at a primary school in West Cornwall, I found her instantly likable, very unassuming. She made me feel at ease. She seemed so grounded,” she writes. Prince William was friendly at every event, she adds, almost in passing.
The Cornwall trip also produced a smaller, less-told scene: a walk with Carrie Johnson, the wife of then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the Johnsons’ one-year-old son, Wilfred. Carrie asked Jill how she dealt with the press. “You just get used to it, and try your best not to let it affect you,” Biden told her, according to the memoir. She also suggested treating every public appearance as a chance to say something — a nod to her own “love” jacket worn earlier on that trip.
The Coronation, With Finnegan
Two years later came King Charles III’s coronation. May 2023. Biden brought her granddaughter Finnegan Biden — Hunter Biden and Kathleen Buhle’s daughter, a history major at Penn at the time. They sat inside Westminster Abbey and watched crowns lowered onto the heads of Charles and Camilla. Biden writes that she felt she was watching history. She also writes that the day carried “a touch of melancholy,” because of who wasn’t there.
She had seen the queen one last time before that, at the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022.
The royal Biden says she knows best, according to the memoir excerpt, is Prince Harry, who now lives in California. She first met him in 2012 at a reception near Buckingham Palace for wounded U.S. and British troops. They crossed paths again at the Invictus Games in England in 2014 and in Orlando in 2016. He had come to the White House when Barack Obama was president. She liked him immediately, she writes — friendly, respectful to everyone in the room.
Whether Kate ever started the journal, Biden doesn’t say.