MICHELLE OBAMA Her next chapter
The bliss of homemade cheese toast. Alone time with her husband. Sharing her new memoir with the world. How the former First Lady is savouring her post-white House life
“Mail, soap … you open a drawer and realise, I never went through this. This house definitely feels like our old normal life.”
On a cool day in early November, Michelle Obama is back in the Chicago home she left behind a bit hurriedly in 2009 when she, Barack and daughters Malia and Sasha decamped for the White House. “It feels so normal,” Obama says. “Like time stood still in this house.” (Though not in the case of the cooking spices, which she’d removed from cabinets and tossed last year. “I was like, these are so old!”) Today she and her mum, Marian Robinson, try to make like old times over a reunion lunch in the solarium-style kitchen.
Robinson, 81, lived with her daughter’s family in the White House but has since moved home to Chicago, while the Obamas remain in Washington, D.C., where Sasha is finishing her last year of high school. Some time after fried chicken and hummingbird cake brought over by celeb chef Art Smith, an old friend, Obama follows her mum out the front door – crossing the threshold that separates normal-normal from Obama-normal. Sure, the former First Lady can now step out without causing a fuss for her Secret Service agents. But her appearance on the porch creates a stir across the street, where kids crowding a playground fence call her name and cheer: “Go, America!”
She walks Robinson towards her car only as far as the Secret Service perimeter will allow. “Love you,” Obama says with a peck on her mum’s cheek. “Don’t speed!” It’s not a caution she has to consider for herself. “No driving for me,” she says of the security restrictions that continue to rule daily life. “We still live in a bubble.”
With her intimate new memoir Becoming out now, the headstrong smart girl from South Side Chicago who made history as America’s first African-american First Lady is trying to make sense of both her extraordinary life journey and that stubbornly lingering bubble. “Knowing where I’m going begins with taking stock of what just happened and how do I feel about it,” Obama, 54, tells WHO. The book is an evocative look back at her modest upbringing and a clear-eyed exposition of what came after: her struggles to fit in at Princeton (“You row crew? What does that even mean?” she writes of encountering other Ivy Leaguers), her difficulties conceiving (after a miscarriage, she turned to IVF to have Malia and Sasha) and the rough patches in her marriage (the Obamas once went to couples counselling). She is not shy about her fury at Donald Trump, whose “birther” lies about Barack’s citizenship stirred “wing nuts and kooks,” endangering her daughters: “For this, I’d never forgive him.”
Sitting down with WHO for a two-part interview – in the D.C. office where she wrote the book and at her Chicago home – she seems relieved to have met the first expectation of her White House after-life. “That was the
assignment. I was supposed to write a book about myself? OK,” she says. “I will tell you everything.”
The book opens with you finding bliss alone in your D.C. backyard, wearing shorts and eating cheese toast. How else are you enjoying post White House freedoms?
A year-and-a-half working on this book settled me down emotionally, gave me a minute to just sigh out the last decade of really hard stuff that we went through. In the White House there’s no time for reflection – there’s barely time to breathe. I’ve always gone for walks, and I can do more of that now. In D.C. we have so many trails where I can just go, and if anyone’s around, they’re so busy walking they don’t even notice me. That’s something – to be able to walk for an hour-and-a-half with no-one noticing I’m alive. I’m trying to show Barack he can do it, too. It’s like, “Come with me!” He came, but you could feel he was sceptical until we were 45 minutes in and nobody noticed. It was fun watching him. I know that felt like freedom for him. Still, we don’t have the anonymity that allows you to be in the world with normalcy. I go to restaurants, I still work out and travel, but I can’t sit at a sidewalk cafe and just watch other people without it becoming a scene.
You can’t wear a disguise?
Then somebody’s gonna say, “What’s Michelle doing in that wig and those glasses?” So I think a disguise would only backfire. I’d be in some tabloid magazine: “What’s she trying to do – what’s wrong with her? That’s crazy!” [ Laughs]
People may be surprised how much they can relate to the upbringing you describe in your book.
That’s the point – to share the commonality in all our stories. Going to Iowa [in 2007] was a realisation that being myself is what connects me to a whole bunch of people that I didn’t think would see themselves in me. My openness allowed us to go beyond name and race and connect as people.
Your mum and brother Craig helped with memories for the book.
It was important to get their sides of the story, because what I thought was the truth was just some portion of the truth. When I wrote that my mother told me how, during her spring cleaning, she would think about leaving my father, my brother read that and texted, “I never knew that.”
Did it feel risky to talk about problems in your own marriage, which so many people idealise?
Our marriage is wonderful, that is all real. But there’s work that goes into it. If we don’t share that – if young people think it’s all roses and happiness – when they hit
“When you don’t have anonymity, you realise how valuable that is to having normalcy”
a bump, they’ll think they’re broken when all it is, is a bump. Because we’re role models, it’s important for us to be honest and say if you’re in a marriage and there are times you want to leave, that’s normal. Because I felt that way.
Was there a time you thought you’d leave him?
There were definitely times when I wished things were different, but I don’t think I ever thought, “I’m just checking out of this.”
What’s marriage like now?
We are finding each other again. We have dinners alone and chunks of time where it’s just us – what we were when we started this thing: no kids, no publicity, no nothing. Just us and our dreams. Recently we went away to Palm Springs – the first time in a long time it was just the two of us. And it was good. I read three books – Educated, An American
Marriage, and I reread my book again. We swam, we sat and he wrote – because he’s still writing his book. So he’s a little resentful. [ Laughs]
What have Malia and Sasha taken from their White House experience?
A level of maturity and resilience that not even Barack or I had to have. They are the most-recognised teenagers in the world, trying to be out in the world like regular kids. And that’s hard when you’re a child, and every day people are watching you, and you know that. There’s no time to just be … to blend in and have fun and make mistakes or smoke your first cigarette or have your first kiss or have a boyfriend – and have your boyfriend’s biography written [in the press] before you even know he likes you. I try to remind them that even the toughest parts of this have value. They’ve grown up with being able to manoeuvre it with grace.
You write about Trump’s “birther” lies (a conspiracy theory that Obama was born in Kenya and a secret muslim) endangering your girls. What was it like having to then shake his hand on Inauguration Day?
There are only 45 families who have been [in the White House]. Anybody else doesn’t understand how risky being in this position is. Unless a bomb threat makes news, you don’t know about the little threats that come in every day that you try to keep from your kids. So I can look at him and say to myself, “You didn’t know what you were doing, but now you will because you have children and grandchildren out there in the world.” I wonder today, does he know what he’s doing? I don’t know the answer to that.
Melania was a birther – also unforgivable?
I will leave it at that. I think my words are clear.
You address the sometimes-racist criticism you faced…
The lies, the comments about my physical nature, my intellect – it was important for me to put it out there and say this stuff does hurt. But “going high” means my reaction to it has to be better and more thoughtful if we’re trying to reach solutions and understanding. I can’t meet your anger with anger.
You’re coming up on an empty nest.
I feel good about it! I’ve got the Global Girls Alliance initiative [on girls’ education], I’ve got a book, I’ve got a husband I can see again.
You’re not weepy?
No. I have the resources that, if I get sad, I’ll go see them. Unlike my parents, who dropped me off at college and just had a phone call, I text with my kids. I can text Malia [at Harvard] right this second and know what she’s thinking. I feel like she’s off on her next adventure, so I’m excited for her. I don’t need my children to make me happy. I had them so that they’d be happy.
Is it still your plan to return to Chicago after Sasha graduates next spring?
When Sasha comes home for breaks, she’s going to want to come home and see her friends in D.C. If we’re in Chicago, we’d be competing with that. So we are going to be in D.C. for a few more years for sure. And then we’re up in the air. We’ll see where our kids land and plant ourselves where we’re close to them in their lives.
Can I ask a shallow question? Do you miss all the First Lady outfits?
I love clothes, but I don’t like the process. Sometimes I forget that I have to [dress up], and I wake up in the morning and I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know what I’m going to wear.”
From shallow to deep: How do you hope to be remembered as First Lady?
I went to my high school yesterday, and to hear three girls say that they chose [Chicago magnet school] Whitney Young because I went there – to know that just my presence in the world made them feel like they could do something big and hard – that’s enough. If that’s my legacy, I’m good with it.