A lady from the first to the last
BECOMING ★★★★ by Michelle Obama Viking, £25
IN this open and engaging autobiography Michelle Obama makes it very clear that, despite pleas from her legion of fans, she will never run for US President.
The former First Lady writes: “I have never been a fan of politics and my experience over the past 10 years has done little to change that.”
While husband Barack was an inspirational idealist, Michelle always came across as a hard-headed realist and this is an impression that Becoming reinforces. Her rags-to-riches story takes her from tough working-class roots in south Chicago to the White House via Princeton University and Harvard Law School. You could call her the American Dream personified.
Michelle Robinson had fire in her belly from the start. Aged 10, she threw a punch at an older bully called DeeDee, thereby earning her respect.
She was also the only family member prepared to talk back to her grandad, known as Dandy, for whom “everything was an irritant… he shouted at the TV, he shouted at my grandmother” who, she says, was a sweet woman who ran a Bible store.
“I talked back to him regularly when he yelled,” she recalls. “In part because it drove me crazy that my grandmother wouldn’t speak up for herself.”
Dandy was the grandson of slaves, a bright man whose dreams had been crushed by the grim reality of racial discrimination. “On the big job sites in Chicago you needed a union card,” she writes.
“If you were black, the overwhelming odds were you weren’t going to get one.”
Obama divides the book into three sections. The first part, Becoming Me, is an object lesson in getting on in difficult circumstances.
Michelle’s father Fraser Robinson III tended boilers; mother Marian was a full-time parent until Michelle started high school. They lived with her maternal great aunt Robbie in the city’s South Shore area.
It was a musical home where prim and proper Robbie taught piano and Fraser loved jazz. Learning and self-improvement were encouraged. Her parents bought her and her older brother Craig (who became a successful basketball coach) a dictionary and an Encyclopaedia Britannica and insisted on correct diction.
Aged 10, a distant cousin asked her: “Why do you speak like a white girl?”
Michelle would see the same confusion when her husband – an Ivy League-educated black Hawaiian raised by middle-class white Kansas folk – was speaking. It made people ask, “Are you what you appear to be?” she writes. “Do I trust you or not?”
Michelle met her future husband at law firm Sidley & Austin after graduating from Harvard. He turned up late, grinning sheepishly and looking “fully unaccustomed to wearing business clothes”.
Barack intrigued her. In part two, Becoming Us, she writes, “He was not like anyone I’d dated before mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful... he was sort of like a unicorn, unusual to the point of seeming almost unreal.”
He eventually proposed to her in a restaurant, arranging for the waiter to bring her a diamond ring on a plate where chocolate cake was supposed to be.
Michelle talks for the first time about the problems the Obamas had in conceiving their daughters Malia and Sasha. After suffering a miscarriage, she says seeing women with children gave her “a pang of longing followed by a bruising wallop of inadequacy”.
A friend suggested a fertility doctor who persuaded her to try Clomid, a drug to stimulate egg production. When that failed, he
recommended IVF. It worked and Malia was born in July 1998.
After Barack’s political career took off, occupying more of his time, she says that “frustrations began to rear up often and intensely”. At her suggestion, he agreed to the couples counselling that saved their marriage.
The book’s final part, Becoming More, charts Barack’s rise to power from Democratic senator (2005) to presidential candidate (2007) to the White House in 2009.
Michelle sat in the balcony at the joint session of Congress where her husband delivered his first presidential address and she watched rival Republicans scowling. She writes: “They would fight everything Barack did, whether it was good for the country or not... it seemed they just wanted Barack to fail.”
The nastiness of US politics, its tribal segregation and the unwillingness to listen or compromise angers her to this day.
Obama writes with candour about the good times and bad, from meeting Mandela and hugging the Queen to watching her father begin to fall apart with multiple sclerosis.
She writes, “The lesson being that in life you control what you can.”
But Becoming has a bigger lesson to impart about the power of self-belief and determination. Obama writes: “I was raised to be confident and see no limits, to believe I could go after and get absolutely anything I wanted.”
And she continues to share that lesson, inspiring girls and women around the globe as she campaigns for a fairer world.