This has been a difficult review to
write, because at the end of nearly four years of Trump, it is not obvious to
write anything negative about Michelle Obama's memoir, which has hit the stores at
the end of 2018 but for which I had not found time to read until this summer.
The good news is: “Becoming” is NOT a political book, or at least tries hard not to be one: Michelle Obama has also said in several places that she has an aversion to politics. "I've never been a fan of politics and my experience of the last ten years has changed little about that." In the first quarter of the book, there is no mention of Barack at all, and even then it takes a while until the career of her famous husband is discussed. This is her story. Michelle talks about her childhood and her adolescence in Chicago, where, thanks to the support of her family and friends and of course thanks to her own dedication, she first gets to go to a good college, eventually to become a lawyer. That is without a doubt the best part of the book. You step into her world, where she soon realizes that life will not be easy for her as a black woman, especially since the family's financial resources are modest. Gradually her commitment grows to not only help herself, but also her environment to have a better future. These are small stories that everyone can identify with, beautifully formulated and not pushy at all. The book has also contains many childhood snapshots.
After a while Barack does of course
come into the picture, and it is a beautiful love story between two people who,
although they are very different, still realize that they are made for each
other, and that they want to make the world better each in their own way. It is
not a sugar-coated story: She tells about the sacrifices she made. About how
she put herself aside. She shares fragile things that she never shared with the
world before. That she once has a miscarriage and that her daughters Sasha and
Malia came into the world thanks to in vitro fertilization, for example. That
she and Barack sometimes took relationship therapy to learn how to communicate
better with each other. That she supported her husband when he ran for
president, but never really believed he would succeed. Undoubtedly, a whole
team of the best ghostwriters have had quite a job with this part of the book,
because it finds the right tone, the right balance: Barack is described as the
idealist we got to know, but their relationship is far from easy.
As soon as Barack Obama
wins his first election however, the story shifts to what happens in the White House,
and focuses on Michelle Obama's battle against the traditional image of a First
Lady and how she, although she hasn't been elected herself, also wants to improve the world
in her own way, while raising two girls to be adolescents. This new context is
obviously not something you can do much about or even ignore, but it does result
in endless pages about the projects of the First Lady to encourage young people
and especially girls to emancipate themselves and play their part in the
society, to get young people to eat healthier – the latter by creating a
vegetable garden within the White House garden.
We also and inevitably get lists of events she attended with her husband, or of people she has been able to meet thanks to her husband. That is not always super interesting - I am thinking, for example, of an uninteresting passage where she meets Nelson Mandela. Luckily, it never gets really boring, it also contains very human and fun anecdotes about encounters with the Windsors and the Queen who has her way with protocol, an epic escape from the bodyguards to slip out of the White House with her youngest daughter to watch the festivities after the Supreme Court ruling finally legalizing gay marriage, a line about her adolescent daughter not being interested in attending a Paul McCartney home concert and a participation in Carpool Karaoke.
Finally and just as
understandably, we get her occasional reflections on politics, on her husband's
achievements, the Republicans' sabotage and of course how she feels about the
unexpected election of, and meeting with Donald Trump – who’s personality and
policy is in all respects the opposite of Barack’s. Here the book feels like a
drag, and a manifesto for the upcoming elections in November 2020. Memoirs don’t
need to be neutral, of course, but writing it a bit more subtle or shorter
could have improved the book.
Conclusion: an interesting and well
written book, with a lot of personal and at times catchy anecdotes, also for
those who do not follow politics, and even for those who have no affinity with
her husband.
