It’s easy to forget that once upon a time, the media was not in love with Michelle Obama. She was once described, not in fawning terms, as “outrageous,” “emasculating,” and a “princess.” During her husband’s first campaign for president, less than half of the nation found Obama favorable. She never wanted to be first lady, let alone become a political wife at all. Yet she left the White House with nearly a 70 percent approval rating.
With her first-ever memoir, Becoming, the city girl from the South Side turned two-time Ivy League graduate turned first lady relays a proper literary coming-of-age saga, not a political strategy. But she doesn’t hold back from having the last laugh.
The political memoir has devolved into a staid, shamelessly utilitarian genre since the grandeur of Ulysses S. Grant’s magna opera. In some modern iterations, the rising senator’s autobiography serves as an innocuous primer on a future presidential candidate’s biography (see: Obama, Barack or Rubio, Marco). In more grating fashion, a political memoir covers for a politician’s lack of rapport with the press or a guilty conscience over an unfavorable narrative (see: Clinton).
Instead, Michelle indulges in the details she cares about: anything but politics.
Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong in 2020. But by the end of Becoming, I’m thoroughly convinced that Obama’s dislike of politics is genuine. Whereas her husband was deeply ideological and almost irritatingly self-interested, Michelle’s story is all-American, a true pulling-up-the-bootstraps tale of a descendant of a slave becoming a woman who designed her own destiny — at least until she entered the White House.
“He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions,” writes Michelle of the difference between her and her husband’s initial approach to marriage. “For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.”
And it shows. Where her husband’s father was largely absent, geographically and emotionally, the men in Michelle Obama’s childhood built a sense of stability and ambition that would take her to Princeton and a notion of family she would adamantly enforce in the White House.
The first couple’s differences extend far and from childhood.
Whereas Barack had a freewheeling coming of age, bouncing from city to country, often separated from family, Michelle’s entire existence is grounded in it.
Whereas young Barack bragged to Michelle about getting stoned in volcanic foothills of Hawaii, Michelle and her brother would destroy her parents’ cigarettes and lecture them about the dangers of lung cancer.
Barack was an idealist who got his start in community organizing. As Michelle describes her own planning for the future: “I wasn’t particularly imaginative in how I thought about the future, which is another way of saying I was already thinking about law school.”
In 2008, such a quip from Michelle would have attracted groans from both the Clinton camp and the GOP. After a decade of ego-driven politics — including from her own husband — her utilitarianism is refreshing.
As is her writing.
Of one of her earlier impressions of her husband, Michelle leans into those 2008 critiques that she mocks Barack’s smugness and style too much: “He’d changed out of his work clothes, I noticed, and was wearing a white linen blazer that looked as if it’d come straight out of the Miami Vice costume closet. Ah well.”
For a woman who spent a better part of a decade as the subject of unbridled racist speculation about her femininity and gender, the act of sharing the nuances of her “privilege, the gift of being female,” feels like an act of radical resistance on its own.
Obama doesn’t necessarily lay bare the minutiae of White House shivving and campaign trail gossip, but rather indulges in sharing the honest, human slices of intimacy, from graduating from a training bra to suffering a miscarriage to using IVF to conceive daughters Malia and Sasha. (“Fertility is not something you conquer,” writes Obama).
Sure, she pushes gun control here and discusses the politics of race relations there. Obama mentions race when relevant, such as pointing out discrimination at Princeton, or notable, such as meeting wealthy, upper-class African-American students in high school from the Jack and Jill social club. But she doesn’t ruminate on it or even stress over it as her Democratic successors have grown accustomed to doing.
Becoming never ceases in its narrative of a marriage united in family and love but so split in values and priorities.
The prologue makes clear that, after a life of straight-ladder ambition and eight years in a job she never truly wanted but made the most of anyways, Michelle Obama finally gets to do what she wants. A cynic will say it’s making bank at Netflix and with her book tour. But the same person could say it’s simply storytelling after a life that exemplifies the American dream.
“He could live in the ocean,” Michelle writes of her husband’s comfort with aimlessness. “I needed the boat.”
With Becoming, you get the sense that Michelle’s ready to take the wheel again.
