Becoming

"This memoir of self-discovery and public service aligns with Oprah Winfrey's focus on empowering narratives and influential women. It's an expected pick for a book club known for spotlighting impactful personal journeys."

"Memoir chronicling the experiences that shaped Michelle Obama's life with unerring honesty and lively wit."

"We are very hungry right now for positive role models and for examples of people who can be in the public eye without losing their dignity or attacking the dignity of others. At the 2016 Democratic convention, Michelle Obama famously said, ‘when they go low, we go high.’ Becoming embodies her desire to go high. Becoming also adheres to what we expect from the genre of celebrity biography. People want to know about the private lives of public people; Michelle Obama obliges us by providing an insider view of life in the White House. We learn about her first kiss, about the fact that she failed the bar exam the first time she took it, about her going to couples counseling with her husband. This is not a biography that withholds the tidbits one craves when reading about a famous person. But I would say Becoming is also part of a distinctive subgenre: autobiographies by reluctant celebrities. She describes herself as an ordinary person on an extraordinary journey. Over and over again, she reminds us that she never wanted fame. As a child, she was friends with the daughter of Jesse Jackson and she discusses throughout Becoming what that taught her about the toll that celebrity—political celebrity in particular—takes on a family. She describes herself as someone who hates chaos, who likes her life to be controlled and how she lost all of that. She emphasizes the constraints of being constantly in the public eye. Her complexity as a person is attacked because she is constantly viewed through racist stereotypes that the public and the media impose on her—for example, seeing her as ‘an angry black woman’ when in reality she’s not an angry person. Then there are the constraints of everyday life: how when you live in the White House, as she did for eight years, you can’t open any windows because it’s a security breach. She talks a lot about her struggle to maintain privacy for her family. And because she’s a reluctant celebrity, we can sympathize with that. Often when we read celebrities complaining about loss of privacy, it can be difficult to be sympathetic because you think, ‘You seek this out.’ But I think Michelle Obama is being honest when she says that if it had been up to her, she would have chosen not to be a celebrity. This is that rare case of someone for whom celebrity is a sacrifice. It’s not a reward or a goal or privilege, but a viscerally painful experience. Yes, and she describes how their family life actually got better when he became president, because he could control his schedule more and be with them for dinner every night. The worst years were when he was a state senator and their children were very young. His schedule was completely unpredictable. She talks about how he would say he would be home soon and so she’d keep the kids up and the dinner warm and then it turned out soon meant ‘after I have this 45 minute conversation with my colleague.’ She’s always been quite irreverent about her husband, which most people find refreshing. She talks about how she came up with a solution that worked for them. She and her daughters would eat at the same time every day, and she would put them to bed at the same time every day. That way her husband would know that if he wanted to see them, he had to get home by that time and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t. It’s her willingness to share stories like that that makes Becoming feel like an authentic tale—though at the same time, one does always have the sense that she’s being quite careful about what she discloses. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Something else that I really noticed about Becoming that I think has to do with Michelle Obama’s sense that celebrity is as much of an imposition as an opportunity: she sees herself as having an obligation to use her celebrity to help others. Plenty of people who initially have selfish reasons for pursuing celebrity eventually use their influence to help others as they mature. But for Michelle Obama, because celebrity isn’t that fulfilling in and of itself, to make something of it requires that she do something for other people. So while she doesn’t like being in the limelight, she finds she can use her position as First Lady to foreground issues that she cares about—like veteran’s health or children’s nutrition. She charts how she learns how to do this over time. Her desire to help others squares with values acquired from her family and her community—that those who have more power and privilege have an obligation to help others, because they could not have achieved what they did on their own. Michelle Obama is attentive throughout the book to all the people who have helped her at every stage in her life. Part of her attraction to Barack Obama is his belief in making the world a better place—and how he uses his own personal charisma to that end. I think she could have. It comes across as an option at one point. She’s been giving speeches without notes and she’s not experienced at dealing with the media and at one event she says something along the lines of ‘for the first time I’m really proud of my country.’ People took that out of context and denounced her as anti-patriotic. After that, she went to her husband’s team and said, ‘Maybe I’m a deficit for you. Maybe I should just drop out.’ They tell her she can do what she wants, but that they think she’s an asset, not a problem. There have been First Ladies who have been very, very behind the scenes. I think Melania Trump is very, very behind the scenes. Trump doesn’t adhere to the same rules as other presidents, so it’s not a great comparison, but I certainly think Michelle Obama could have been less in the public eye than she was. There are a lot of disadvantages to being a celebrity. In her autobiography, Sarah Bernhardt says that publicity and celebrity are “a monstrous octopus” and that most people don’t know how to handle it until they’re in their 40s. Our society promotes fantasies about becoming a celebrity. Some quite young people, when they become famous, think they’re realizing those glorious fantasies, but—as is the case with almost every fantasy—the reality is usually more complicated and alloyed. I also think that, objectively speaking, it has become more difficult to be a celebrity. There is less and less privacy now that everybody has a phone with a camera and a recorder. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Suicide and harmful drug use are rampant problems not unique to celebrities. When someone who already has problems becomes a celebrity, then the pressures of stardom can exacerbate those problems. If newly fledged celebrities don’t have the right support around them and if they already have a lot of psychological issues, the stress of having no privacy, the stress of acquiring so much money so fast, the stress of having so many people offering all kinds of things to you because you’re famous and they want to get close to you—those are strains that many can’t handle. But you can also make the same point about poverty. I’d be more concerned about having a discussion about how being poor adds to the stress of having addictions or psychological problems. To flip your question around: I find it remarkable how many celebrities, some very young, seem quite well-equipped to handle the challenges of celebrity. Taylor Swift seems like somebody who’s handling her celebrity really well. Elizabeth Taylor started out as a child star, and though she had her a rocky moments, she wasn’t destroyed by her celebrity—far from it. We could say the same thing about Kim Kardashian. Usually, if you dig a little bit and ask what’s going on, the stars who thrive tend to have supportive families, rather than predatory or absent family members. In the Amy Winehouse documentary that came out a few years ago, her mother seemed very passive and absent, and her father was a grifter trying to use her. She had no one around her truly committed to taking care of her."

"Robin: Becoming was a finalist for Audiobook of the Year and won in the Audie Awards 2020 Autobiography and Memoir category. This is a case where you have to hear Michelle Obama read her story. She puts her whole emotional self into it. Robin: If they have the ability to stay with the emotional content, yes. But that’s not always easy, because a lot of the memoirs have some very tough parts to them. The author may have written a memoir and put it down on paper, but that’s not the same as being isolated in a booth and reliving it all again. Robin: Years ago, I interviewed Katharine Graham, who was the publisher of the Washington Post , about her memoir. She had done loads of interviews about her memoir, including TV interviews. She told me that the hardest part of any of that was recording some of the painful passages and chapters for the audiobook. It was as if she had to live it again. In a way, once she had put it down on paper, it was done, but narrating the audiobook brought it all back."

"Michelle Obama’s book is, first and foremost, a story about how she became who she is – a highly accomplished lawyer-turned-public-servant-turned-hospital administrator, a fiercely protective mother, a devoted wife – and then the story about the struggle to hold onto that identity, to maintain a semi-sane life, even after she agrees to let that life be hijacked by politics. Obama often gets didactic, even social science-y, but her excellent writing shines through in sections about her childhood and college years. Obama describes the profound frustration of being misunderstood – of being pegged as an “angry black woman” – and the discomfort of being a hyperaccomplished woman only recognized through her connection to a powerful man. Becoming is about the power in telling one’s own story, on one’s own terms."

"'Becoming,' by Michelle Obama."

"I have been poring over them for the past two years, using them as inspiration for my own."