Review | For eight years, Michelle Obama watched every word. In her memoir, she’s done with that. Who doesn’t love Michelle Obama? After reading this article in the Washington Post (see below) about her touching and honest memoir, Becoming, I love her even more. Sadly, she has no political ambitions. In her memoir, Obama talks about everything from her deep love for her disabled father who died in 1991to the racist slurs she had to endure as First Lady. When called “an angry black women”, she writes how she wanted to ask her detractors, which word mattered to them the most. Is it ‘angry’ or ‘black’ or ‘woman’?
Points that struck me in the book: how important our childhoods are in shaping us - about a third of the book is devoted to Obama's family, her disabled father, her parents' ambitions and love for their kids growing up in a cramped apartment in 1960’s South Side Chicago. She always knew she was loved and that gave her the confidence to believe in herself when others didn’t. When her high school counsellor advised her not to apply to Princeton, where her brother already was a student, she ignored him, applied and was accepted.
She is funny about her husband. When she first met him she was struck by how he was “oddly free from doubt, though at first glance it was hard to understand why.” She also writes about how while deeply in love with the man who would become her husband she also worried early on in the relationship that his strong intellect and ambition could swallow hers.
In Becoming, Obama openly discusses the strains in their marriage - when she and her husband had difficulty conceiving and he was gone a lot on the campaign trail. She writes that she was “a working full-time mother with a half-time spouse.’ Not wanting her kids to think life started when Dad got home. “We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.” Obama writes about struggles that many women have, whether they are black or not. “When they go low, we go high.” She is one dignified lady.
https://wapo.st/2PkOxgU ... See more
The former first lady doesn’t tiptoe around the ugly stuff in “Becoming.”