A lot has been written and said about Michelle Obama. In ‘Becoming’ she gets a chance to tell her story from her own perspective. Here, she talks about everything from growing up in the South Side of Chicago, in a nuclear family of four sharing a one-bedroom apartment, offering new insights into her upbringing to living at the world’s most famous address. You get the sense that she is being as candid as she is allowed to, never straying away from the limits of being politically correct and safe.

 

However, Becoming manages to create a sense of intimacy with you as a reader because you get to know quite a few things about the highs and lows of life with Barack Obama, and also what she felt and went through as a mother whose kids were too young to understand what was going on when all of a sudden they had Secret Service agents following them wherever they went. She talks about meeting famous personalities, including Nelson Mandela and the Queen of England, who apparently doesn’t care about or follow the royal protocols as much as the world likes to believe she does.

 

Michelle reminisces about her first loves, her first date with Barack, and how he eventually proposed. She also talks about her pregnancy complications, miscarriage, and IVF treatment, and learning how she navigated all of that while being in the public eye is inspiring to say the least.

 

The book is divided into three parts but it’s the first section where she talks about her childhood and her ambition to excel at school that is the most enjoyable. She got into Princeton out of spite for her high school guidance counselor who told her she was not ‘Princeton material’. In the later parts, she writes that it was clear to her that Barack’s ‘forceful intellect and ambition’ could possibly end up swallowing hers unless she stood her ground and believed in her own worth and the importance of her ambitions and priorities as she goes on to narrate Barack’s political career and the impact the campaign had on her family. In the end, you realize it’s her compulsive need to prove those who doubt her wrong and the ‘buzzy sort of satisfaction’ she gets from learning that ultimately made her the unflappable former first lady you saw and heard on TV.

 

However, certain chapters read like an image-making campaign for the former president. He is portrayed as a messiah of sorts, and when Donald Trump is the president that’s an idea that’s not hard to sell either. But as you read about Barack and his seemingly unyielding need to do good you realize it would be credulous to believe he is as flawless as he is made out to be.

 

 Maybe as the wife of a two-term former president you are bound by some unwritten rules of conduct. You wish it weren’t so, many times over while reading Becoming. But because Michelle has always had a knack with words, she manages to worm her way into your heart.

 

Book: Becoming

Genre: Memoir

Author: Michelle Obama

Language: English

Published: November 13, 2018

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Pages: 448, Hardcover