USA TODAY International Edition
First lady’s memoir lays out small moments
Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” reveals everyday concerns and fears of a mother, wife and daughter.
The big revelations from Michelle Obama’s memoir have made headlines, including the fact that she and Barack Obama turned to in vitro fertilization to conceive their daughters.
There are some smaller tidbits in “Becoming,” being published by Crown on Tuesday, that are new:
She took Hillary’s advice.
After moving into the White House, Obama sat down with one of her predecessors as first lady, Hillary Clinton, who by then was secretary of state. Obama’s new role was undefined and sometimes perplexing, “a strange kind of sidecar to the president.”
Clinton was candid about her own missteps. She told her successor that “she’d misjudged the country’s readiness to have a proactive professional woman in the role of First Lady,” Obama writes. “She’d tried to do too much too quickly, it seemed and had run straight into a wall.”
For the next eight years, she said, “I myself tried to be mindful of that wall.”
Even royal feet hurt.
At her first dinner at Buckingham Palace, the first lady found herself chatting with Queen Elizabeth II. “You’re so tall,” the queen noted. (Indeed, the queen is about 5-foot-4; Obama is 5-foot-11.) “Well, the shoes give me a couple of inches,” she replied.
The queen glanced at Obama’s black Jimmy Choos: “Those shoes are unpleasant, are they not?” The first lady acknowledged her feet hurt. The queen said her feet, clad in black pumps, hurt too. “We were just two tired ladies oppressed by our shoes,” Obama writes.
3. Her mother gave the Secret Service the slip.
The first lady had to twist her mother’s arm to persuade her to move from the South Side of Chicago to the third floor of the White House. Marian Robinson reluctantly agreed, but she waived Secret Service protection. She would come and go as she wished, out the gates to the local CVS. When strangers would comment that she looked exactly like Michelle Obama’s mother, she would shrug and say, “Yeah, I get that a lot.”
4. The horrors of Sandy Hook hit her and her husband hard.
In their eight years in the White House, the only time President Obama asked his wife to come to the Oval Office in the middle of a workday was just after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. “For us, as for many people, the tragedy at Newtown shattered every window and blew down every fence,” she writes. “When I walked in to the Oval Office, Barack and I embraced silently. There was nothing to say. No words.”