MICHELLE OBAMA EXCLUSIVE:
the lessons I’ve learned
On a squally December evening beside the River Thames, the faithful have been gathering for hours. London’s South Bank Arts Centre is a place you usually come to see the theatrical aristocracy, rock legends and opera divas, but tonight’s star turn is a middle-aged mother-of-two, whose self-declared vice is peanut butter.
Nobody here has ever known such a demand for tickets. On the day of their release almost 60,000 applications were made for the 3000 available, and for weeks London has been humming with stories of astounding sums – up to £10,000 (about $17,500) a seat – being paid on the black market.
All around the entrances there are huddles of the ticketless, mostly women, many clutching candles and photographs, who are here just to be in the proximity of Michelle Obama.
The former US First Lady’s new memoir, Becoming, is on course to be the most successful publishing event in history,
with 1.4 million copies sold in the first week of its release. Other authors on promotional tours are lucky to fill coffee shops. Michelle has been filling stadiums.
Adoration barely describes what the waiting fans feel for her. The pre-show crush crackles with words like “inspirational” and “empowering”, but what really comes across is the sense of a woman who, in a world short of good examples, represents a rare, unifying ideal.
When she hits the stage, dressed in a white jumpsuit by the British designer Emilia Wickstead (a diplomatic touch), the place goes wild. It’s an endearingly mixed audience, with rapper-hatted teenagers from tough inner-city schools crammed in alongside middle-class couples, lots of young women, many from community organisations, and, by special invitation, The Weekly. Sprinkled about are politicians, a scattering of media stars, and unseen in the wings, a pregnant Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, who will later have a private meeting with Michelle.
In the hour that follows there are laughs, a hint of tears, much serious reflection, regrets and a conspicuous avoidance of politics. We learn early on that among the few things that scare Michelle – especially from an altitude of 1.8m – are high heels: “Trying not to fall over is one of the major things I have to think about in public,” she explains. “When I come onstage I’m like, ‘Don’t fall, just don’t fall over …’ Among my goals for eight years in the White House was ‘don’t become a meme’.”
Instead, she became a uniquely popular First Lady, and as the continuing clamour suggests, one whose appeal is in no danger of flagging. “With Michelle there’s something more than window dressing and formal responsibilities,” says British author Viv Groskop, who has studied the phenomenon. “She has become a totemic figure for women, a sort of Beyoncé of unelected politics, a global ambassador who can do no wrong.”
How Michelle, 54, came to be this way is really the story of Becoming. Born into a hard-up, but unusually close and supportive working-class family on the south-side of Chicago, she became a high-achieving student and joined a law firm where she met an “exotic geek” called Barack Obama, who convinced her to join him not only in marriage, but “saving the world”. Although they were “ying and yang” – she studious and driven, he freewheeling and idealistic – they played exquisitely to each other’s strengths. Yet, as she explains to the audience, it was her parents, Fraser and Marian Robinson, who first gave her the belief that she could succeed.
“Even when I was tiny, it was never, in our home, a case of ‘speak when you are spoken to’. My mother wanted her children’s voices to be heard. Both my parents believed my voice was important, and that was the gift they gave me. They saw a flame in me, and instead of doing what we often do to girls, which is to put that flame out, because it gets seen as you not being ladylike, or you being bossy, they wanted to keep that flame alight, because they knew I’d need it later on.
“So, I grew up with that kind of energy. You could say what you liked, but you had to speak proper English, not use street slang, and reading was important. We were expected to be excellent.”
Within this family forum, everything was up for discussion. “My dad liked to explain things properly,” recalls Michelle. “Once I asked him whether we were rich, and the next week he brought his pay packet home, and spread the money out on the table and then brought out all the bills he had to pay, and matched them up, and showed us what was left over. It wasn’t much.
“When we asked about sex, and why it was such a big deal, it was the same thing. He didn’t dodge the question. He’d say, ‘I’m not going to lie to you, sex is fun’, but this was along with the idea of responsibility and love being important, too.”
She doesn’t claim to have enjoyed the White House years, and with two daughters of her own, Malia, now 20, and Sasha, 17, to raise, found the constant scrutiny wearying. “Any time I went anywhere without causing a fuss,” she writes in her memoir, “it felt like a small victory.” A big part of the problem, she reveals to the London audience, was that she never expected to be there: “The main reason I agreed to support Barack’s run for president,” she winces, “is that, deep down, I’m thinking: ‘There’s no way he’s gonna win’! And then when he lost I could be that supportive wife, saying: ‘Aw, honey, you tried your best, now let’s go back to our nice lives.’”
Cue loud hoots and whoops of laughter, but it is hard to miss the smack of sincerity. Many of her fans would love her to run for office on her own account, á la Hillary Clinton, but Michelle insists there’s no chance. Instead, she believes that she can do more as an outsider, harnessing her global star power to the campaigns she holds dear – particularly children’s health and girls’ education.
It is a polished performance, with notes of poignancy, self-deprecation and occasional camp. Don’t be fooled by the
“You have to be realistic … you really can’t have it all.”
“No Drama” Obama tag, she cautions. Life, politics and, especially, marriage are never easy. She goes on to tell of how, in the early years of her husband’s emergence on the political scene, they were forced to seek counselling.
“You have to be realistic about relationships. Marriage isn’t equal. You really can’t have it all! I tell young women there are going to be whole chunks of time when you want to push him out of the window,” she says. “It’s never the other way around of course. He never wants to push me out of the window because I’m perfect.”
Oprah Winfrey has described Michelle’s stage presence as “a mighty force”, and although there are a few riffs that suggest over-rehearsal, it is hard to argue. “She’s authentic, passionate, and brilliant at playing the role of an ordinary woman in an extraordinary position,” says Viv. “She connects with people, especially women, in an amazingly natural way. If you look at public speakers over the last 50 years it would be hard to find anyone who has her cut-through or universal appeal. When I coach women in public speaking, I’m repeatedly asked to make them ‘more like Michelle’.”
But who really is Michelle? Even the lady on stage doesn’t seem sure. Earlier in the day, while visiting a girls’ school in east London, she spoke of suffering from “impostor syndrome”. Clinicians describe the condition as a nagging sense of self-doubt and fear of being exposed as a fraud – particularly among the outwardly successful.
“It never goes away,” she told the schoolgirls, “that feeling you shouldn’t take me too seriously. What do I know? I share that with you because we all have doubts about our abilities, and about our power.”
From the 400-plus pages of Becoming, you can make up your own mind. The candour is hard to fault, as is the core lesson that, with the right guidance, character and intent, pretty much anyone can rise to anything. Which doesn’t necessarily mean, as Michelle explains as a parting shot, the best always rise to the top.
“I have been,” she says, “at probably every powerful table you can think of. I’ve sat on corporate boards, I’ve been to G8 summits, I’ve sat in at the UN. So let me tell you the secret about the folks that run the world. They’re not that smart!”
“How would you feel if Daddy ran for President?”
So much of the last decade had been about trying to strike a balance between my family and my work, figuring out how to be loving and present for Malia and Sasha while also trying to be decent at my job. But the axis had shifted: I was now trying to balance parenting with something altogether different and more confusing — politics, America, Barack’s quest to do something important. The magnitude of what was happening in Barack’s life, the demands of the campaign, the spotlight on our family, all seemed to be growing quickly. After the Iowa caucuses, I’d decided to take a leave of absence from my position at the hospital, knowing it would be impossible, really, to stay on and be effective. The campaign was slowly consuming everything. I’d been too busy after Iowa to even go over and box up the things in my office or say any proper goodbye. I was a full-time mother and wife now, albeit a wife with a cause and a mother who wanted to guard her kids against getting swallowed by that cause. It had been painful to step away from my work, but there was no choice: My family needed me, that mattered more.
And so here I was at a campaign picnic in Montana, leading a group of mostly strangers in singing Happy Birthday to Malia, who sat smiling on the grass with a hamburger on her plate. Voters saw our daughters as sweet, I knew, and our family’s closeness as endearing. But I did think often of how all this appeared to our daughters, what their view was looking outward. I tried to tamp down any guilt. We had a real birthday party planned for the following weekend, one involving Malia’s friends sleeping over at our house in Chicago and no politics whatsoever. And that evening, we’d hold a private gathering at our hotel. Still, as the afternoon went on and our girls ran around the picnic grounds while Barack and I shook hands and hugged potential voters, I found myself wondering if the two of them would remember this outing as fun.
I watched Sasha and Malia these days with a new fierceness in my heart. Like me, they now had strangers calling their names, people wanting to touch them and take their pictures. The government had deemed me and the girls exposed enough to assign us Secret Service protection, which meant when Sasha and Malia went to school or summer day camp, usually driven by my mother, it was with the Secret Service tailing them in a second car.
At the picnic, each one of us had our own agent flanking us, canvassing the gathering for any sign of threat, subtly intervening if a well-wisher got overenthused and grabby. Thankfully, the girls seemed to see the agents less as guards and more as grown-up friends, new additions to the growing knot of friendly people with whom we traveled, distinguishable only by their earpieces and quiet vigilance. Sasha generally referred to them as “the secret people”.
The girls made campaigning more relaxing, if only because they weren’t invested in the outcome. For both me and Barack, they were a relief to be around — a reminder that, in the end, our family meant more than any tallying of supporters or bump in the polls. Neither daughter cared much about the hubbub surrounding their dad. They weren’t focused on building a better democracy or getting to the White House.
All they wanted (really, really wanted) was a puppy. They loved playing tag or card games with campaign staff during quieter moments and made a point of finding an ice-cream shop in every new place they went. Everything else was just noise.
To this day, Malia and I still crack up about the fact that she’d been eight years old when Barack, clearly feeling some sense of responsibility, posed the question one night while he was tucking her into bed. “How would you feel if Daddy ran for President?” he’d asked. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”
“Sure, Daddy!” she’d replied, pecking him on the cheek. His decision to run would alter nearly everything about her life after that, but how was she to know? She’d just rolled over then and drifted off to sleep.
That day, we visited the local museum, had a water-pistol battle, and kicked a ball around. Barack gave his speech and shook hands, but he also got to anchor himself inside the unit of us. Sasha and Malia climbed over him, giggling and regaling him with their thoughts. I saw the lightness in his smile, admiring him for his ability to block out peripheral distractions and be a dad when he had the chance. He chatted with Maya and Konrad [Barack’s sister and brother-in-law] and kept an arm around my shoulder as we walked from place to place.
We were never alone. We had staff around us, agents guarding us, members of the press waiting for interviews, onlookers snapping pictures from a distance. But this was now our normal. Over the course of the campaign, our days had become so programmed we’d watched our privacy and autonomy slip away, both Barack and I handing nearly every aspect of our lives over to a bunch of twentysomethings who were intelligent and capable but still couldn’t know how painful it could feel to give up control over my own life. If I needed something at the store, I had to ask someone to get it. If I wanted to speak to Barack, I had to send a request through one of his young staffers. Events and activities I didn’t know about would show up on my calendar.
Slowly, as a matter of survival, we were learning to live more publicly, accepting the reality for what it was.