Michelle Obama candidly shares her story in revealing new memoir
As Michelle Obama’s highly anticipated memoir “Becoming” arrives, it’s clear that the former first lady is occupying a space in the culture beyond politics. With an arena book tour featuring A-list special guests, she seems to exist in the middle ground between two icons she calls friends, Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Her approach is short of Winfrey’s full-on confessional style but goes further than the guarded intimacy of Knowles-Carter’s art and performances.
Her book walks a similar line. It’s revealing, right down to the glossy cover photo in a casual white top — one shoulder exposed, eyes bright. (Spoiler: It’s not the kind of shirt a soon-to-be political candidate wears.) But Obama, who was famously guarded as first lady, still values her privacy — even as she offers frank opinions about Donald Trump and discloses past fertility struggles.
“I don’t think anybody will be necessarily prepared to read a memoir like this — especially coming from a first lady,” said Shonda Rhimes, the television producer, who read an advance copy of Obama’s book.
The first-lady memoir is a rite of passage, but Obama’s is different by virtue of her very identity. “Becoming” takes her historic status as the first black woman to serve as first lady and melds it deftly into the American narrative. She writes of the common aspects of her story and — as the only White House resident to count an enslaved great-greatgrandfather as an ancestor — of its singular sweep.
In the 426-page book, Obama lays out her complicated relationship with the political world that made her famous. But her memoir is not a Washington read full of gossip and political score-settling — though she does lay bare her deep, quaking disdain for Trump, who she believes put her family’s safety at risk with his vehement promotion of the false birther conspiracy theory.
“The whole (birther) thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks,” she writes. “What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.”
It is the most direct and personal language she’s used about Trump.
The Washington Post obtained an early copy of Obama’s book, which was released Oct. 30. Even those who have followed Obama’s life closely in the decade and a half since her husband was a relatively unknown Illinois politician will come away with fresh understanding of how she sees the world and the people and experiences that shaped her.
She divides the memoir into three parts: Becoming Me, Becoming Us, Becoming More. The first section is a deep, often sociological exploration of Chicago and the people and institutions there. Its textured discussion of gentrification, public education, race and class are reminders that Obama majored in sociology and minored in African-American studies at Princeton University.
The second section, Becoming Us, is a romp through her romance with Barack Obama, starting a family with him and her search for work that she loved. It begins with words that have never before been written by a first lady about her man: “As soon as I allowed myself to feel anything for Barack, the feelings came rushing — a toppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfilment, wonder.”
The third section, Becoming More, traverses their life as public figures. It contains her own view of her legacy and accomplishments as first lady and what it felt like to live under the intense scrutiny she faced. As she campaigned for her husband’s reelection in 2012, she writes that she felt “haunted” by the ways she’d been criticized and by people who had made assumptions about her based on the colour of her skin.
She thought then about what she owed and to whom: “I carried a history with me, and it wasn’t that of presidents or first ladies. I’d never related to the story of John Quincy Adams the way I did to that of Sojourner Truth.”
From the preface, Obama promises a story that covers the full contour of her life — growing up in a “cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago” to living in “a place with more stairs that I can count.” From “being held up as the most powerful woman in the world” to being “taken down as an ‘angry black woman.’”
As to her influence on Barack Obama’s policies and plans, there’s no indication that she sought to sway decisions or served as any kind of informal adviser. Instead, family time became sacred; world issues pushed aside in favour of tales from middle school. After their family dinners, he had his briefing books, and she had hers.
Throughout the book, Obama makes it clear that she remained wary of the political press and the public “gaze” and felt, at times, bullied, stereotyped and underserved — particularly during her husband’s 2008 campaign.
“If I’d learned anything from the ugliness of the campaign, from the myriad of ways people had sought to write me off as angry or unbecoming, it was that public judgment sweeps in to fill any void . ... I knew that I would never allow myself to get that banged up again.”
Well before others in the White House, she and her team made use of pop culture, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to push her initiatives, shape her public brand and own her story. She propelled her own popularity.
Obama’s carefulness extends to parts of her memoir. There’s a part of herself that she holds back. She has a sacred circle of sister friends who she says kept her grounded in the White House, but she mentions them only briefly. She talks about her mother’s anchoring influence and how raising her own daughters changed her. But she is careful to keep all but the surface details of their lives private.
Her book, which was released one week after the midterm elections, will spark conversation as the Democrats look for a standard-bearer for the 2020 general election. She seeks to put an end to calls for her to run for office: “I’ve never been a fan of politics, and my experience over the last 10 years has done little to change that. I continue to be put off by the nastiness.”