| BECOMING Michelle Obama New York: Crown Publishing Group, November 2018 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-5247-6313-8 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-5247-6313-6 | 426pp. | HC/FCI | $32.50 | |
A number of books have been written about Michelle Obama, wife to the first African-American president of the United States of America. She herself wrote one about the garden she caused to be installed at the White House, and now this one. It is a gripping memoir, an inspiring and unsparing testament that reveals a woman of courage, competence, intelligence and empathy. The narrative takes us from her babyhood on the South Side of Chicago through her eight years as FLOTUS: First Lady of the United States.
Her own drive, aided by stout-minded and stable parents and a host of relatives, took her through middle and high school to Princeton University and Harvard Law School. She joined the Chicago law firm Sidwell & Austin and did well there. But . . .
"A senior partner asks if you'll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don't know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who's busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he's black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it's an odd one." – Pages 92-93 |
The oddly-named hotshot, of course, was the man who went on to become the forty-fourth president of the United States. His reputation had preceded him to Sidley & Austin: Word was that one of his professors at Harvard considered him the most exceptional law student she'd ever taught. But he showed up late to his first meeting with Michelle — something the punctual, detail-oriented mentor-to-be abhorred. Another thing that put her off was that he was a smoker. But those defects quickly ceased to matter.
This phrase is credited to Michael Gerson, speechwriter for George W. Bush, who used it in connection with his education initiative No Child Left Behind, introduced almost 17 years ago. It refers to the way expressions of low esteem on the part of teachers and other authority figures, whether overt or subtle, can dampen student performance.
Michelle Obama seems to have understood its menace all her life. She first refers to it in connection with her middle school, Bryn Mawr, where the principal fought back against a Chicago Defender opinion piece that called it a "run-down slum" governed by a "ghetto mentality." She writes that the principal, Dr. Lavizzo, understood exactly what he was up against.
Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It's vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. Those 'feelings of failure' [Dr. Lavizzo] mentioned were everywhere already in my neighborhood, in the form of parents who couldn't get ahead financially, of kids who were starting to suspect that their lives would be no different, of families who watched their better-off neighbors leave for the suburbs or transfer their children to Catholic schools. There were predatory real estate agents roaming South Shore all the while, whispering to home owners that they should sell before it was too late, that they'd help them get out while you still can. The inference being that failure was coming, that it was inevitable, that it had already half arrived. You could get caught up in the ruin or you could escape it. They used the word everyone was most afraid of—"ghetto"—dropping it like a lit match. – Pages 43-44 |
"Very quickly, I realized that Barack would need little in the way of advice. He was three years older than I was—about to turn twenty-eight. Unlike me, he'd worked for several years after finishing his undergrad degree at Columbia before moving on to law school. What struck me was how assured he seemed of his own direction in life. He was oddly free from doubt, though at first glance it was hard to understand why. Compared with my own lockstep march toward success, the direct arrow shot of my trajectory from Princeton to Harvard to my desk on the forty-seventh floor, Barack's path was an improvisational zigzag through disparate worlds." – Page 97 |
This was not a case of love at first sight, or even of attraction on Michelle's part.1 She could not date someone she was mentoring. Also, the press of work had made her swear off dating entirely. And there was the smoking. Still, they worked well together and soon developed a mutual respect. Barack was good at basketball; this endeared him to other young men at the law firm, and later earned him the approval of Michelle's older brother Craig. A spark arose gradually in Michelle, and near the end of that summer it blossomed into flame. Gradually, it also ignited the realization that the button-down world of corporate law was unfulfilling. She began to hanker for community-oriented work where she could foster social progress. While Barack was the trigger for this, it's clear that she was destined for that sort of work.
However, Barack had to finish law school, while she had bills to pay and a natural aversion, sprung from her humble upbringing, to dropping the job that let her pay them. They got together when she made recruiting trips to Harvard, and they flew to Hawaii at Christmas break to meet Barack's family on his mother's side. But mostly their lives continued the trajectories they'd been on before they met, and Michelle pondered the dilemma of what sort of work she could go after to find the sense of meaningfulness she craved.
She also faced personal tragedies: a miscarriage; the loss of a Princeton roommate to cancer; the death of her father to complications of multiple sclerosis.
She became engaged to Barack when he returned to Chicago to work, and shortly flew to Africa to meet the other side of his family. They married in October 1992 and honeymooned in northern California. Before the wedding, Barack had planned to join a law firm and finish his book, but he had been persuaded to become the Illinois rep for Project VOTE!, an organization dedicated to registering minority voters. He threw himself into this job, and made a difference; but he also neglected his book, and blew the contract. (A teaching gig fit in there somewhere too.) He was now on the hook to repay the $40,000 advance. But his agent hooked him up with another publisher, and his mother found him a cabin where he could finish the manuscript. It was remote and quiet — on the Indonesian island of Bali.
The rest of the story is equally interesting, but readers can discover it for themselves. I'll just say that Michelle found suitable work for herself, and supported Barack — not without misgivings — as he dove ever deeper into political work — passing through the Illinois state Senate, the U.S. Senate, and finally the presidency — and helped him raise their two daughters. It was a challenging journey for her (and for Barack, to be sure.) But she met all the challenges with aplomb and never forgot how to laugh. That's quite an achievement, in my view.
One thing that is notable about the story she tells is how she manages to remain steady and balanced through most every crisis. To borrow a phrase, she gets by with a little help from her friends. I think some soft-pedalling took place, but to be fair she does mention some blow-ups: arguments with Barack; laying down the law to Secret Service agents a time or two. She reports anger at the rough-and-tumble of politics a number of times. And who can blame her? Donald Trump comes in for specific and circumspect blame at several points; again, I put no fault on her for this, and it really makes up a very minor part of the story. Vituperation is not in Michelle Obama's makeup — despite what some hostile reviewers would have you believe.
Fear, however, is in her makeup, and she frankly admits it: fear for Barack, for their daughters, for the Secret Service agents and other staff, and for the process of governing they were all working so hard to maintain. It certainly did not paralyze her; but in the political climate of these years, a degree of apprehension is a rational response.3
"The so-called birthers had tried during the previous campaign to feed a a conspiracy theory claiming that Barack's Hawaiian birth certificate was somehow a hoax and that he'd in fact been born in Kenya. Trump was now actively working to revive that the argument, making increasingly outlandish claims on television . . . *
* * "All the while, in their quest for clicks and ratings, news outlets—particularly the more conservative ones—were gleefully pumping oxygen into his groundless claims. "The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. I feared the reaction. I was briefed from time to time by the Secret Service on the more serious threats that came in and understood that there were people capable of being stirred. I tried not to worry, but sometimes I couldn't help it. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family's safety at risk. And for this, I'd never forgive him." – Pages 352-3 |
To sum up, this is a very readable account of a thoroughly admirable collaborative success at life under the challenging circumstances of high-level politics in America. What makes it so admirable, and so hopeful, is the fact that Michelle Obama is in no sense extraordinary. She merely exemplifies the qualities of a typical American woman. She merely muddles through anything life throws at her. So do all the members of the reality-based community. Fifty images, ranging from black&white from her early years to full color, buttress this assessment: most of them are distinctly non-glamorous. I wish there was an index. But this stands very well without one. I give it full marks and rate it a keeper.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.