Book Review: Michelle Obama understands easily why she does not want to become president

This is not an ordinary life story. Young Michelle Robinson grows up in a narrow apartment in Chicago's South End. The father has multiple sclerosis, but works hard at the water treatment station in the end. The mother is a housewife, they are more beautiful. But at Michelle and her brother, they embark on an ambition of self-confidence. Michelle is a graduate of Princeton and Harvard, both graduates of semi-educated schools located in disadvantaged areas of Ivy League University.

"My Story" has 450 pages, well written but long-haired, and had been good for a sharp editorial sax. Anyone expecting political revelations or clarifications about the White House's mechanisms will be disappointed, even if we have a pretty good picture of the surrealistic life of the world's most watched little family. . But here and there – especially in the first half of the book – there are fascinating perspectives in an unlikely life.

When Barack Obama As she enters Michelle's life, she writes her personality to make her shine. He, who she will guide for a summer in the prestigious law firm where she already has a bright future, she becomes her friend first. It's natural, these are two of the very few young black lawyers in the agency. Then they fall in love and have not fallen in love with the man she describes: idealistic, impossible to drive, constantly holding a book in hand, indifferent to the superficial social circles in which they must settle, beautifully interesting .

But as the autobiography progresses and Barack Obama becomes public, he wipes out pages of the book. Of course it's a happy marriage, she's clear about it. But she seems to have decided that the president, to whom she had yielded in many ways to the electorate, was no longer her description.

This also applies to all others – a lot! – people in the private and political life of the family are flashing in the second half of the book. They remain card figures, carefully described, very politely. Friends who "mean a lot" but who are never in the flesh, a lifeless friendship portrayed with the Biden family, employees who are "important" to the family but who never become more than the name of the family. 39, a book page.

Is it something? "My story" is, it's mastery. Carefully restrained. There is no anger here – Michelle Obama has long cheated, absolutely necessary for a first lady. In particular, someone who is aware of his new privileges. And especially a black woman, the first in her mail, who is already part of the first Obama campaign, learns that she must constantly laugh to not be perceived as a threat. But mastery is not a particularly grateful quality of an author. It's perhaps also something that has Obama's huge star status – they are usually portrayed as the only real popular couple rooted in popular culture, cool to the touch of a fingertip – which makes you hope for more flesh and blood, more than Beyonce than Hillary Clinton.

Here and there, however, frustration is felt beneath the surface, in the weird choice and word. A little lazy in the portrait of a young black woman who is trying to perform at Princeton and at the workplace, when she suggests the racist structures that characterized the eve of the election campaigns, a little to the end when Donald Trump makes an entry (she will never forgive him), she writes. for his temper against his family).

But most clearly, the frustration is actually in the parties to be Barack Obama's wife. When the couple is forced to follow IVF treatments to have children, it's something that they both want – but she has sticks in her thighs and her post-graduate coming out of the sperm and can "go get a glass of martini afterwards". . She quickly realizes that she is in love with a man whose intelligence and ambition can swallow hers and that she must protect her career and her program at all costs . How is childhood an impossible storm of inadequacy while her husband smokes "as if from nothing". How she really does not want Barack to be a presidential candidate, but nibbles and gets the most out of it.

In this perspective, it is almost understandable that she devotes many long and boring pages to describe the cultures she can behave in the gardens of the White House (salad, spinach, fennel, broccoli, carrots, kale, onion, peas, etc.). draw attention to an initiative to combat childhood obesity and describe how its commitment to veterans is awakened – I did everything I could, it seems she wanted to scream, with the role in which I was forced.

The absence of politics In "My story" is striking. The eight years of Barack Obama's presidency slip into the background. For example, Michelle Obama, who herself has worked as a director of community issues in a hospital, must have been deeply involved in health insurance reform – but Obamacare is not mentioned in a word.

The book seems written with the primary purpose of explaining once and for all, unequivocally, that Michelle Obama has no intention of following in her husband's footsteps. Again and again, she explains how indifferent she is to politics. For those who have probably not already understood the message, she writes directly in the epilogue: "I will never be a candidate for the presidency".

The book makes it easy to understand why she does not want to. For what appears, albeit for a long time, is a representation of how impotence can, in a certain way, accompany the epicenter of power itself.

biography

"My story"

Michelle Obama

Overs. Manne Svensson

Forum Editor, 449 pages