Joe Biden gives prostate cancer update
Former President Joe Biden says prostate cancer will prevent him from holding as many conversations about his upcoming memoir, Promise Me, America, as he had hoped. In a Sunday post on X, he described an uneven daily reality: “Some days are better than others.” He said his doctors remain encouraged by his response to treatment and thanked those whose prayers and kindness have supported him, Jill and their family. The book, due November 17, reflects on his presidency from 2021 to 2025.
Biden announced his diagnosis in May 2025, when his office said the cancer had spread to his bones but was hormone-sensitive. He completed radiation treatment that October. For a family that lost Beau Biden to brain cancer in 2015, the illness carries particular heartbreak. Yet Biden closed with his father’s words: “Champ, when you get knocked down, get up”—a lesson he offered to himself and the country.
Biden’s statement describes a change in what he expects to be able to do around the release of the book. A memoir can involve a long series of interviews and events in which an author talks through the decisions and memories that appear on the page. His message sets a more limited expectation for that public schedule. He says he had hoped to take part in more of those conversations than his health now allows.
His reference to better days and harder ones also explains why the number of appearances is a personal decision. An event takes preparation and sustained attention as well as the time spent in front of an audience. A public announcement can set a date for a book, but it cannot make every day of its release period predictable for the person who wrote it.
The linked article puts the new statement alongside Biden’s earlier account of the diagnosis and treatment. Those are separate pieces of information. The diagnosis announcement described what his office had learned about the cancer. The more recent message describes how he is experiencing daily life and what he thinks he can take on. His thanks to his doctors and to people who have supported his family are part of that same update.
The memoir looks back on his presidency. For readers, the published book gives Biden room to recount events in sequence and explain how he understood them at the time. An interview would offer a different setting, with an interviewer able to ask about decisions or follow up on a particular recollection. The change in his public plans means there may be fewer of those exchanges alongside the text he has prepared.
The statement also makes room for his family. Biden thanks the people who have been thinking of Jill and the rest of the family alongside him. The article recalls Beau Biden’s death because that loss is part of the family history against which Joe Biden is now talking about his own illness. The words he attributes to his father give the message a personal ending. They connect what he has said about taking fewer engagements with the advice he remembers hearing long before either the memoir or this diagnosis.