The former first lady\u2019s memoir is mostly about her childhood in Chicago, her marriage and her time in the White House, but she leaves room for some unequivocal criticism of President Trump.<\/b>
\nFor anyone who\u2019s wondering: No, she\u2019s not running. In her new memoir, \u201cBecoming\u201d \u2014 a book whose reportedly enormous advance rendered its contents almost as closely guarded as the bullion at Fort Knox \u2014 Michelle Obama puts to rest any speculation about her political ambitions. \u201cI\u2019ve never been a fan of politics,\u201d she writes, \u201cand my experience over the last 10 years has done little to change that.\u201d
Note how she says \u201cthe last 10 years,\u201d not two. She emerges in these pages as a first lady who steadfastly believed in her husband\u2019s abilities but had no illusions that the sludge of partisanship and racism would melt away under the sunny slogans of hope and change. A month after President Obama started his first term in 2009, Michelle Obama was sitting in the balcony during a joint session of Congress, where she could see a cadre of Republicans scowling while her husband delivered his address. \u201cThey would fight everything Barack did, I realized, whether it was good for the country or not.\u201d She continues, \u201cIt seemed they just wanted Barack to fail.\u201d
This might sound like the acuity of hindsight if it weren\u2019t consistent with the woman she had already shown herself to be: Michelle, the wry, orderly realist to the dreamy, cerebral Barack, joking on the 2008 campaign trail about her husband\u2019s slovenly habits in the real world. She also talked candidly then about how the popular enthusiasm for him and his message \u2014 in a country in which the prospect of a black president had seemed far-fetched even to her \u2014 made her feel. \u201cFor the first time in my adult lifetime,\u201d she told a crowd before the Wisconsin primaries, \u201cI\u2019m really proud of my country.\u201d
She got hammered for it and felt blindsided, taking it as a lesson that she needed to be even more careful and prepared than she already was. Having gone from a working-class upbringing in South Side Chicago to the rarefied precincts of the Ivy League, she was already a self-described \u201ccontrol freak\u201d who took her minority status at Princeton as a \u201cmandate to overperform.\u201d Politics, though, turned out to be a weird mix of elite pretensions and schoolyard bullying, amplified by opposition research.
Early in \u201cBecoming,\u201d she recalls how, as a 10-year-old, she earned the respect of a mean girl named DeeDee by throwing a punch at her. Four decades later, campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Obama made an impassioned case for civility \u2014 \u201cWhen they go low, we go high\u201d \u2014 that she explains as part of a lifelong belief in speaking out \u201cagainst bullies while also not stooping to their level.\u201d Obama never squares the two episodes, making the decision to include DeeDee all the more intriguing or puzzling, depending on your perspective; DeeDee, it seems, is an outlier \u2014 the grain of sand in this polished pearl of a memoir.
[ Read more news about Michelle Obama\u2019s \u201cBecoming.\u201d]
The book is divided into three sections \u2014 \u201cBecoming Me,\u201d \u201cBecoming Us\u201d and \u201cBecoming More\u201d \u2014 that sound like the bland stuff of inspirational self-help. Which isn\u2019t to discount how useful empowerment can be; Obama emphasizes how important role models are, especially for young women of color in a culture that isn\u2019t changing fast enough. But this book isn\u2019t all unicorns and rainbows. By the end of it, she ultimately champions endurance and incremental change; she will probably be lauded and lambasted accordingly.
Obama recalls a mostly happy childhood. Her father tended boilers; her mother stayed at home to care for Michelle and her older brother. Even as her father\u2019s body began to break down from multiple sclerosis, he insisted on going to work. His illness taught her the necessity of meticulous planning, of showing up not just on time but early \u2014 \u201cthe lesson being that in life you control what you can.\u201d
What you can control on your own turns out to be a lot more than what you can control as one-half of a partnership, especially when the man you marry isn\u2019t a \u201cbox checker,\u201d like you.
When Michelle Robinson first heard her fellow lawyers swooning over a new summer associate named Barack Hussein Obama, she was dubious. \u201cIn my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers,\u201d she writes. Other than registering his \u201crich, even sexy baritone\u201d on the phone, she wasn\u2019t all that impressed, especially when he showed up for his first day at work irritatingly late. The \u201ctoppling blast of lust, gratitude, fulfillment, wonder\u201d would come later. But she would always find it hard to adjust to his tardiness, his constant belief that things would simply work themselves out, and the way his ambitions often dictated the course of their lives.
\u201cBecoming\u201d divulges some details that the Obamas haven\u2019t discussed publicly before: the fertility treatments they used to conceive Malia and Sasha; the miscarriage that left her with a \u201cpang of longing followed by a bruising wallop of inadequacy\u201d whenever she saw women walking with their children in the street; the couples counseling that saved their marriage when she felt as if his political career \u201cwould end up steam-rolling our every need.\u201d She talks about the wardrobe that attracted so much scrutiny, explaining the great pressure she felt as the only African-American first lady so far in a culture addicted to image and double standards. She also includes some requisite ticking off of her achievements from inside the White House, including her initiatives against childhood obesity and in favor of veteran support.
But it\u2019s the moments when Obama tries to make sense of what she\u2019s seeing now, in the country, that are among the most moving \u2014 if only because she\u2019s so clearly struggling to reconcile the cleareyed realism of her upbringing, brought about by necessity, with the glamorous, previously unthinkable life she has today. During her entire time in the White House, she says, \u201cI had lived with an awareness that we ourselves were a provocation.\u201d She unequivocally calls the new president a \u201cbully\u201d and a \u201cmisogynist,\u201d watching him do everything he can to roll back her husband\u2019s legacy and replace \u201ccarefully built, compassionate policies\u201d with what seems to be brazen cruelty. \u201cI sometimes wonder,\u201d she writes, \u201cwhere the bottom might be.\u201d
\u201cMy grandfather lived with the bitter residue of his own dashed dreams,\u201d she recalls; like many African-American men of his generation, she says, his stymied aspirations left him with \u201ca basic level of resentment and mistrust.\u201d Her life has been different, filled with possibility, wealth and achievement. She insists on enumerating the gains the country made in the eight years before 2016, however incremental, because it would be too easy, she suggests, to succumb to despair. \u201cProgress is slow,\u201d she tells young people nowadays; they need to rely on \u201ctheir persistence, self-reliance and ability to overcome.\u201d
For all the attempts by conservatives a decade ago to paint her as a radical, Obama seems to be a measured, methodical centrist at heart. But hers isn\u2019t a wan faith in expanding the pie and crossing the aisle. Her pragmatism is tougher than that, even if it will come across as especially frustrating to those who believe that centrism and civility are no longer enough. As she writes in \u201cBecoming,\u201d she long ago learned to recognize the \u201cuniversal challenge of squaring who you are with where you come from and where you want to go.\u201d<\/p>\n

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