‘Like it or not, Barack and I are role models’

Television and publishing legend Oprah Winfrey did the first interview with Michelle Obama about her new memoir – here is an extract from their conversation

OPRAH WINFREY: First, let me just say: nothing makes me happier than sitting down with a good read. So when I realised – in the preface! – what an extraordinary book was coming, I was so proud of you. You landed it. The book is tender, it is compelling, it is powerful, it is raw. MICHELLE OBAMA: Thanks. OW: Why Becoming? MO: We actually had a blooper list of titles that we won’t go into here. But Becoming just summed it all up. A question that adults ask kids – I think it’s the worst question in the world – is, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ As if growing up is finite. As if you become something and that is all there is. OW: You grow up and you are many different things – as you have been many different things. MO: And I don’t know what the next step will be. I tell young people that all the time. You know, all young women probably have some magic number of what age you’ll be when you’ll feel like a grown-up. Generally, when you think your mother will stop telling you what to do. OW: [Laughs] MO: But the truth is, for me, each decade has offered something amazing that I would never have imagined. And if I had stopped looking, I would have missed out on so much. So I’m still becoming, and this is the story of my journey. Hopefully, it will spark conversations, especially among young people, about their journeys. OW: There are so many revelations in this book. Was writing about your private life scary? MO: Actually, no, because here’s the thing that I realised: people always ask me, ‘Why is it that you’re so authentic? How is it that people connect to you?’ And I think it starts because I like me. I like my story and all the bumps and bruises. I think that’s what makes me uniquely me. So I’ve always been open with my staff, with young people, with my friends. And the other thing, Oprah, I know that whether we like it or not, Barack and I are role models. OW: Yup. MO: I hate when people who are in the public eye – and even seek the public eye – want to step back and say, ‘Well, I’m not a role model. I don’t want that responsibility.’ Too late. You are. Young people are looking at you. And I don’t want people to look at me here and now as Michelle Obama and think, ‘Well, she never had it rough. She never had challenges, she never had fears.’

*************** OW: You write about meeting Barack, ‘I’d constructed my existence carefully, tucking and folding every loose and disorderly bit of it, as if building some tight and airless piece of origami… He was like a wind that threatened to unsettle everything.’ At first, you didn’t like being unsettled. MO: Oh God, no. OW: This I love so much – a moment that cracks me up: ‘I woke one night to find him staring at the ceiling, his profile lit by the glow of streetlights outside. He looked vaguely troubled, as if he were pondering something deeply personal. Was it our relationship? The loss of his father? “Hey, what are you thinking over there?” I whispered. He turned to look at me, his smile a little sheepish. “Oh,” he said, “I was

just thinking about income inequality.”’ MO: That’s my honey. OW: [Laughs] MO: I mean, here’s this guy and, at the time, I was a young professional. This is when I was coming into my own, right? I had a job that paid more than my parents ever made in their lives. I was rolling with bourgeois class. OW: Uh-huh. MO: My friends owned condos, I had a Saab. I don’t know what’s cool these days, but a Saab, back in the day, oh yeah. I had a Saab, and the next step was, okay, you get married, you have a lovely home, and on and on and on. Yes, the bigger problems of the world were important. But the more important thing was where you were going in your career. In the book, I talk about Barack meeting some of my friends and how that didn’t really play out. OW: [Laughs] MO: ’Cause he’s this serious sort of incomeinequality guy, and my friends are like…

OW: You really let us into the relationship. I mean, down to the proposal and everything. You also write about some major differences between the two of you in the early years of your marriage. You say, ‘I understood it was nothing but good intentions that would lead him to say, “I’m on my way!” or “Almost home!”’ MO: Oh gosh, yes. OW: ‘And for a while, I believed those words. I’d give the girls their nightly bath but delay bedtime so that they could wait up to give their dad a hug.’ And then you describe this scene where you’d waited up. He says, ‘I’m on my way, I’m on my way.’ He doesn’t come. And then you turn out the lights – I could hear them click off, the way you wrote it. MO: Mm-hmm. OW: Those lights click, you went to bed. You were mad.

MO: I was mad. When you get married and have kids, your whole plan, once again, gets upended. Especially if you get married to somebody who has a career that swallows up everything, which is what politics is. OW: Yeah. MO: Barack Obama taught me how to swerve. But his swerving sort of – you know, I’m flailing in the wind. And now I’ve got two kids, and I’m trying to hold everything down while he’s travelling back and forth from Washington or Springfield. He had this wonderful optimism about time. [Laughs] He thought there was way more of it than there really was. And he would fill it up constantly. He’s a plate spinner – plates on sticks – and it’s not exciting unless one’s about to fall. So there was work we had to do as a couple. Counselling we had to do to work through this stuff. OW: Tell us about counselling. MO: Well, you go because you think the counsellor is going to help you make your case against the other person. ‘Would you tell him about himself?!’ OW: [Laughs] MO: And, lo and behold, counselling wasn’t that at all. It was about me exploring my sense of happiness. What clicked in me was that I need support and I need some from him. But I needed to figure out how to build my life in a way that works for me.

OW: The most important thing I think you said was that we live by the paradigms we know. And in Barack’s childhood, his father disappeared and his mother came and went. She was devoted to him, but was never really tethered to him. But you grew up in the square. The tight weave of your family.

MO: His mother was in Indonesia, he was raised by his grandparents, he didn’t know his father – and yet even with this context, he was a solid guy. You realise that there are so many ways to live this life. OW: You also write, ‘When it came down to it, I felt vulnerable when he was away.’ I thought that was kind of amazing, to hear a modern woman – a First Lady – admit that. MO: I feel vulnerable all the time. And I had to learn how to express that to my husband, to tap into those parts of me that missed him – and the sadness that came from that – so that he could understand. He didn’t understand distance in the same way. You know, he grew up without his mother in his life for most of his years, and he knew his mother loved him dearly, right? I always thought love was up close. Love is the dinner table, love is consistency, it is presence. So I had to share my vulnerability and also learn to love differently. It was an important part of my journey of becoming. Understanding how to become us. OW: What was so valuable to me – and I think will be for everyone else who reads the book – is that nothing really changed. You just changed your perception of what was happening. And that made you happier. MO: Yeah. And a lot of the reason I share this is because I know that people look to me and Barack as the ideal relationship. I know there’s #Relationshipgoals out there. But whoa, people, slow down – marriage is hard! OW: You even say you all argue differently. MO: Oh God, yes. I am like a lit match. It’s like, poof! And he wants to rationalise everything. So he had to learn how to give me, like, a couple minutes – or an hour – before he should even come in the room when he’s made me mad. And he has to understand that he can’t convince me out of my anger. That he can’t logic me into some other feeling. OW: So what was the argument, or the conversation, that got you to say yes to him running for the presidency? Because you mention in the book that every time someone would ask him, he’d say, ‘Well, it’s a family decision.’ Which was code for ‘If Michelle says I can, I can’. MO: Imagine having that burden. Could he, should he, would he. That happened when he wanted to run for State Senate. And then he wanted to run for Congress. Then he was running for the US Senate. I knew that Barack was a decent man. Smart as all get out. But politics was ugly and nasty, and I didn’t know that my husband’s temperament would mesh with that. And I didn’t want to see him in that environment. But then, on the flip side, you see the world and the challenges that the world is facing. The longer you live and read the paper, you know that the problems are big and complicated. And I thought, ‘Well, what person do I know who has the gifts that this man has?’ The gifts of decency, first and foremost, of empathy second, of high intellectual ability. This man reads and remembers everything, you know? Is articulate. Had worked in the community. And really passionately feels like ‘this is my responsibility’. How do you say no to that? So I had to take off my wife hat and put on my citizen hat.