All hail Obama as SHE conquers the globe
Her husband may have been US president but, appropriately for International Women’s Day, it is Michelle leading the couple’s second act
FOR EIGHT years she stood to the side, draped in smiles and designer gowns while her husband took centre stage as leader of the free world. Michelle Obama shone as America’s First Lady, despite enduring unprecedented critical scrutiny with husband Barack as the nation’s first black president.
But four years on from their departure from the White House, it is Michelle who is leading the couple’s remarkable second act in the face of adversity.
“This past year has been difficult for us all on so many levels,” she said as she turned 57 in January.
She has been outspoken about many of those challenges – the coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the recent insurrection attack on the US Capitol – yet for Michelle personally this has been the best of times.
The paperback edition of her bestselling memoir, Becoming, has just been published in the UK, along with a young reader’s edition. The couple were paid a staggering £50million for a joint publishing deal, but Becoming sold more than 15 million copies and counting – more than three times the sales of Barack’s post-presidential memoir A Promised Land.
She won a Grammy award last year for best spoken word recording with Becoming, launched her own top-rated Spotify podcast, and a Gallup poll in December found Michelle was “America’s most admired woman” for the third year running.
She is leading the way with the couple’s media company Higher Ground Productions, which has enjoyed a banner year. She recently announced a slate of new movies and TV shows in the pipeline under their deal with Netflix, estimated to be worth £120million over the next three years: more than Prince Harry and Meghan’s deal with the studio.
And Michelle herself is no longer taking a back seat. She will star in Waffles + Mochi, a new Netflix children’s series about healthy eating and good food, which debuts next week.
“I’m beyond thrilled,” says Michelle, who travelled across the globe accompanied by two Muppet-style puppets for the series. She has been working hard steering the Obamas’ production company, which won an Oscar in 2020 with its first documentary, American Factory.
AMONG their coming projects are five major feature films and three television series. These follow the Obamas’ 2020 successes with two acclaimed documentaries: Crip Camp, and Becoming, inspired by Michelle’s memoir.
The couple who entered the White House in 2008 with a net worth of £1.3million are today worth a reported £97million, and while elder statesman Barack has spent the past four years working quietly in the background, Michelle has been conquering Hollywood and New York’s literary scene.
Her memoir offers insights.
“I knew from the outset that if I was going to write a memoir, it had to include more than the shade of blue I chose for a china pattern or who was or wasn’t invited to a State Dinner,” she writes in a new introduction to the paperback edition.
“I am who I am not because of the titles I’ve held or the celebrities I’ve met, but because of the snaking paths and winding roads, the frustrations and contradictions, the constant growth that is painful and joyful and full of confusion.”
She tells the story of the Chicago deeply personal water plant worker’s daughter born Michelle LaVaughn Robinson who studied hard, graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, became a lawyer, raised two daughters and built a career as a hospital vice-president long before becoming First Lady, where she was praised as “the most powerful woman in the world” and derided as an “angry Black woman”.
Most importantly, it tells how Michelle found her voice.
She finds joy in “rediscovering the tiniest details that I’d long brushed aside: the fresh smell of cleaning products on a spring day, the natural ease with which my grandfather kept the record player humming on a Saturday afternoon, the sound of ice scraped off a windshield on a frozen Chicago morning”.
The night before her memoir was published in 2018, Michelle admits: “I woke up in a panic… What if the book just isn’t any good?What if people hate it?”
Barack wrapped his arms around his wife, reassuring her: “It’s good, Miche. It really is.”
Millions of readers agree. Michelle went on to tour America, packing arenas with fans as she spoke of the experiences that moulded her, from visiting a marriage counsellor with Barack to raising children in the White House.
She recalls the summer she met her husband, initially unimpressed with the lowly associate attorney at her Chicago law firm.
“It was magic… chipping away at my defences and eventually winning me over with his perspective, his grounded nature, his sense of humour. And oh, that smile.”
Michelle reveals how she suffered a heartbreaking miscarriage, which left the Obamas feeling “broken” and “failed”. They eventually conceived both daughters – Malia, now 22, and Sasha, 19 – by IVF.
WORK PRESSURES pulled them apart when Barack toiled as an Illinois senator, and Michelle admits: “Frustrations began to rear up often and intensely.” In desperation they sought marriage counselling.
“Barack and I loved each other deeply, but it was as if at the centre of our relationship there was suddenly a knot we couldn’t loosen,” she says. Hours of therapy sessions helped them survive the rough patch.
The book reveals the anxiety Michelle endured behind her ever-diplomatic smile.
“Barack was a black man in America,” she says, recalling his presidential campaign. “I didn’t really think he could win.”
As a black woman campaigning for a black president she was attacked for being too forceful, and confesses: “I was getting worn out, not physically, but emotionally.”
Michelle knew she would be criticised if she dressed in designer fashions, or too casually, “so I mixed it up”. Her biggest surprise as First Lady was in meeting the Queen and Prince Philip, appreciating “their authentic
ity and matter-of-factness”. In their last meeting, the Queen told Michelle to ignore protocol and sit beside her on the drive to Windsor Castle, saying of Palace convention: “That’s rubbish, sit wherever you like.”
Michelle worried her daughters would be spoiled growing up with White House butlers and servants at their beck and call. She tried to ground them, “making sure they made their own beds, giving them curfews as they grew older”.
But she found White House life painfully patriarchal, with everyone catering exclusively to Barack’s needs: “It sometimes felt like a throwback to some lost era... and it was the opposite of what I wanted our daughters to think was normal.”
Yet by the end of his eight-yearWhite House tenure it was Michelle, with her honesty and vulnerability, who had become an Oprahesque inspirational figure, repeatedly asked to run for the presidency: an ambition she rejects because she wants to live “a normal life.”
Her book sends a relentless message: Stay focused, work hard, never accept a limiting label, and never give in to your insecurities. “This book affirmed within me the value of bucking against that instinct, in stepping into our fears,” says Michelle.
“It’s where the greatest truths come from – the understanding of what matters and
what doesn’t.”