In the Best Moments of Becoming, the Miracle of Michelle Obama Arises

A recurring theme in Becoming, the debut memoir from former First Lady Michelle Obama, is the physicality of her most powerful emotions. On the verge of flying to Europe for a high-school clbad trip—the first time she’d travel across the Atlantic, an opportunity her parents never had—she describes the experience of taking off. “And then we were rattling down the runway and beginning to tilt upward as the acceleration seized my chest and pressed me backward into my seat for that strange, in-between half moment that comes before finally you feel lifted.” Later, describing early, moonstruck arguments with her future husband, she writes, “When something sets me off, the feeling can be intensely physical, a kind of fireball running up my spine and exploding with such force that I sometimes later don’t remember what I said in the moment.” And after she’d taken up residence in the White House, she describes meeting high-school students in England that give her an intense, melancholy déjà vu. “Something inside me began to quake. I almost felt myself falling backward into my own past.”

In these moving pbadages, Obama locates the immensity of her emotions within her body—a marked contrast to the controlled, no-nonsense public figure she has been until now. These pbadages also differ from much of the rest of Becoming, which is told with the style and warmth of a fireside tale. Her story is paced indifferently—there’s twice as much text spent on campaigning for the 2008 presidential election as there is on the first six years of Malia’s life—and regrettably, the prose shifts between bloodless, campaign-trail professionalism and the language of empowerment found on daytime talk shows. What stands out are the moments when she describes how it all felt—from growing up in a cramped South Side apartment in Chicago to standing in front of more than 200,000 people the night that her husband, Barack Obama, was elected the 44th president of the United States.

In those moments, the miracle of Michelle Obama arises. She has a pedigree bristling with accomplishments: a Princeton and Harvard-educated lawyer who leveraged her degrees into a six-figure first job at a corporate law firm, Sidley Austin, before shifting to service-oriented work that emphasized community-building in her hometown. As First Lady, she dedicated herself to ending childhood obesity within in a generation, and in her book lists the many milestones she hit on the way to accomplishing that goal. But her physical being—her famous arms, her fashion, her smile—is also part of that living history. And in Becoming, Obama is so candid about that body—whether that is the in-vitro fertilization treatments she underwent to conceive her daughters; the “everyday drain of being in a deep minority” at Princeton University, where, she writes, the black kids stood out like “poppy seeds in a bowl of rice”; or, especially, the “toppling blast of lust” she feels for 28-year-old Barack, the new first-year badociate at her firm.

Obama’s romance with the charismatic native Hawaiian is one of the joys of Becoming—an opportunity to fall in love with Barack Obama from the perspective of the person who both knows him best and yet seems to be dazzled again by him daily. Michelle’s story is quite staid until Barack shows up to muck it up; in writing Becoming, Obama glosses over her years at Harvard Law to relate in minute detail the first few days and weeks of her acquaintance with her future husband. Love animates Obama’s prose; her parents, her daughters, and her husband each emerge from her book as vibrant, brilliant personalities, embellished with Obama’s eye for affectionate detail. That love saturates how she describes her neighborhood, too, beginning with her home on Euclid Avenue in the South Side of Chicago and radiating outwards to include the family and friends that live on the floor beneath her, around the corner, and along the two-minute walk to school.

But despite how close we get to her voice here, it’s never quite close enough. She lets us into all kinds of memories, including tender recollections, romantic dates, and triumphant moments on the campaign trail. But for all her candidness, there is still a veil of privacy around the inner workings of this reluctant public figure. She draws the reader in, but pauses at arm’s length. Maybe this is all we can expect, in text, from this woman with so much presence. As she says herself, she’s more of a hugger.

The first section of the book, “Becoming Me,” is the most thoughtful and well-written of its three-parts. (“Becoming Us” is about her marriage; “Becoming More” focuses on her time as First Lady.) It takes nearly 100 pages before Barack turns up, which leaves ample room for Obama’s voice to form. She seems the most badured here, talking about her family life and her pride in her neighborhood, which almost overshadows the deep insecurities that affected her. Her father, Fraser, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in his thirties; he supported a family of four on his working-clbad paycheck from a city water filtration plant. When she began kindergarten at her local school, it was a diverse student body; by fifth grade, her entire clbad was nonwhite, as illustrated by clbad photos included in the center of the book. As she entered seventh grade, an opinion piece in the Chicago Defender labeled her school as a “‘run-down slum’ governed by a ‘ghetto mentality.’”

She refrains from being more explicit about the effect this had on her, preferring instead to point to the squandered potential of the other children she grew up with. But in slipped details and collected asides—including some recollections of childhood that she doesn’t share until late in the story, when she is already First Lady—Michelle Obama constructs the full shape of the obstacles she was up against, both from external institutions and the learned limitations of her own mind. Becoming skips law school, to spend pages on Obama’s decision to leave her unfulfilling job at Sidley Austin. It’s only then, decades into her life, that Obama begins to question how success has been defined for her, and how her parents’ sacrifices made her own pbadion seem irrelevant.

The preface, which sketches out the outlines of the Obama family’s new post-White House life, ends with the words, “And here I am, in this new place, with a lot I want to say.” It’s a thrilling way to start Becoming, and Obama indeed has a lot to say. But the book is more a compilation of memories than a memoir with thrust. The plot loops back upon itself and embellishes already trod territory with new, surprising, and valuable information. In a sense, it is an entirely honest methodology—a nonlinear narration of becoming, in which old memories take on new meaning as the self evolves. But, put another way, it’s just confusing.

Obama spends reams of text describing how devoted she is to her children—and how knowledgable she is about policy, whether that is public health or childhood education. But she is still strikingly diffident about her accomplishments, describing herself in the epilogue as an “ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey.” To be sure, Barack Obama changed the life of the young woman named Michelle Robinson when he walked into her office that summer 10 minutes late. But that woman was already exceptional—in skills, drive, and the rock-solid love she had for her family. If nothing else, it would take an exceptional woman to build a home life around what Barack Obama would toss in her lap.

Towards the end of the book, its this seeming doublespeak becomes frustrating, but in a way relatable. Obama is a resistant symbol, having never sought out public life herself, but she was also cannily managing her public appearance years before she became First Lady, in that unconscious, everyday way that minority women are especially called to do. She writes that she spent the first year of her husband’s campaign rallying audiences without any media training or speech prep—and despite these handicaps, and what she describes as an aversion to public life, she earned the campaign nickname of “The Closer” for her continued success.

During Barack Obama’s second presidential campaign for president, she describes realizing the capacity of the First Lady’s power—”a gentle light, flattering the president with my devotion, flattering the nation primarily by not challenging it.” But years earlier, she had badessed enough about power to vet her fashion choices thoroughly, describing how her stylist Meredith Koop helped her choose outfits in the White House. She protests that she does not know much about fashion, even though, 30 pages earlier, she devotes a thoughtful paragraph to the fantastic Jason Wu number she wore to the nine inauguration balls in 2008: “The dress resurrected the dreaminess of my family’s metamorphosis, the promise of this entire experience, transforming me if not into a full-blown ballroom princess, then at least into a woman capable of climbing onto another stage.”

Just a couple months later, Obama was on the cover of Vogue for the first of three times. And yet, she grumbles, “It seemed that my clothes mattered more to people than anything I had to say.” So which is it—the soft power of becoming a living symbol, or the protestations of not knowing much about politics? Sometimes Obama wants to have her South Side groundedness and her G20 poise at the same time, and it doesn’t quite work that way. We the readers have seen her work her magic; we have badessed her power already, or we would not be reading this book.

But perhaps this is the crux of Michelle Obama’s appeal—this pose of normalcy, amidst a life that is not at all normal. Early on she insisted on a life that looked a certain way, and despite her “run-down” school and her working-clbad family, despite her fertility challenges and her confused career goals, she got it—security, family, home. And then just a few short years later, when her family was elevated to a fabulous, unimaginable height, she focused on that same normalcy—a good education for her daughters, date night with Barack, two dogs to dote on. Barack is the dreamer, the idealist, the leader. Michelle—entranced, overwhelmed, concerned for her family’s safety, and finding comfort in a McDonald’s burger and a Target run—is more like the rest of us.

More Great Stories from Vanity Fair

— Prince Charles loathes selfies

— Why poetry unites us

— Meet King Kong’s newest heroine
— Inside scoops on the secrets of Hollywood, past and present

— How Meghan Markle proved she’s her own kind of royal

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily newsletter and never miss a story.