[ad_1]
The former first lady Michelle Obama has published her memoirs. (Charles Sykes / Invision / AP)
As Michelle Obama's long-awaited memoir, "Becoming," arrives, it is clear that the former first lady has a place in culture beyond politics. With a reading tour in the arena with special guests, she seems to exist halfway between two icons that she calls friends, Oprah Winfrey and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. His approach is far from Winfrey's confessional style, but goes beyond the guarded intimacy of Knowles-Carter's art and performance.
His book follows a similar line. That's revealing, up to the glossy cover photo in a casual white top – an unobstructed shoulder, shining eyes. (Spoiler: This is not the kind of shirt that a future political candidate wears.) But Obama, who was deemed to be guarded as the first lady, continues to value her privacy – even though she offers Frank opinions on Donald Trump and discloses his previous fertility problems. .
"I do not think anyone will necessarily be willing to read a memoir like this, especially from a first lady," said television producer Shonda Rhimes, who read a preliminary copy of the book. ; Obama.
The memory of the first lady is a rite of passage, but Obama is different because of his very identity. "Becoming" takes its historical status as the first black woman to become First Lady and skillfully merges it with the American narrative. She describes the common aspects of her story and – as the only resident of the White House to count a slave great-great-grandfather as an ancestor – of her singular journey.
In this 426-page book, Obama exposes his complex relationship with the political world that made him famous. But her memoir is not a gossip reading and settling of political accounts in Washington – though she reveals her deep disdain for Trump, who she says puts her family's safety at risk by vehemently promoting her Phantasmagorical plot theory.
"The totality [birther] The thing was crazy and petty, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia were barely concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir the wing nuts and nuts, "she writes. "What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and went to Washington?" And if this person was looking for our daughters? Donald Trump, with his noisy and reckless insinuations, put the safety of my family at risk. And for that, I will never forgive him. "
This is the most direct and personal language she has used about Trump.
The Washington Post has obtained a first copy of Obama's book, which will be released Tuesday. Even those who have been following Obama's life for about fifteen years since her husband is a relatively unknown Illinois politician will leave with a new understanding of how she perceives the world, the people, and the experiences. who shaped it.
She divides the memoir into three parts: Become me, Become us, Become more. The first part is a deep, often sociological, exploration of Chicago, its people and institutions. His textured discussions on gentrification, public education, race, and class are reminiscent of Obama's specialization in sociology and his strong interest in African American studies at Princeton University.
The second section, Becoming Us, tells of his love affair with Barack Obama, the creation of a family with him and his search for the work she loved. It begins with words that have never been written by a first lady about her man: "As soon as I allowed myself to feel everything for Barack, feelings rushed – an explosion of lust, gratitude, realization, of wonder ".
The third section, Becoming More, goes through their lives as public figures. It contains his own vision of his legacy and accomplishments as first lady and how he felt under the painstaking control that he faced. While campaigning for her husband's re-election in 2012, she writes that she felt "haunted" by the way she was criticized and by the people who had made her assumptions based on her color. skin.
She then thought about what she owed and to whom: "I carried with me a story, and it was not that of the presidents or first ladies. I would never have told the story of John Quincy Adams as Sojourner Truth's. "
Michelle Obama is getting ready to step on the scene at the When We All Vote rally in September. (Joe Buglewicz for the Washington Post)
From the preface, Obama promises a story that covers the entire outline of his life. She grew up in a "cramped apartment in South Chicago" to live in "a place with more stairs than I can count". From "being considered the most powerful woman in the world" to "being slaughtered as an" angry black woman "."
She returns to a discussion about what she calls the "black woman" angry who persecutes her: "I was a woman, black and strong, which is the case for some people. . . It was another damaging cliché, which has always been used to sweep the minority women around the perimeter of each room. . . I was now starting to feel a little angry, which made me even worse, as if I were fulfilling a prophecy set for me by the enemies of hate. "
Obama is most telling when writing about his 30 years; how she continued to mourn the death of a dear friend and her beloved father; how she handled her own version of the "Can I Have Everything?" dilemma facing working mothers.
She also shares for the first time intimate details, for example, that she and her husband had difficulty getting pregnant, had a miscarriage and both girls were conceived through in vitro fertilization. And that she did a lot of that while her husband was away in the state legislature, letting her handle herself the injections that are part of this process.
[[[[Michelle Obama's holidays are over. Now, she's claiming her own star]
Inevitably, her memoirs will be compared to those of other first ladies. His goal of owning your own unique story distinguishes his book, but it resembles that of Laura Bush in one respect. The two women searched their lives more deeply before the presidential entrance.
"I was very surprised, pleasantly surprised by the degree of openness and level of openness of his presence," said Rhimes, who read memoirs of the other first ladies and created them a fictitious on his show "Scandal". I love the honesty, the humor and the beauty with which she approached the romance of her marriage and the tribulations of her marriage and motherhood, as well as all the things to which we can all go. identify.
Obama, for example, describes a well-known happiness at lunchtime for many women who work and raise young children. She sometimes left her office, had lunch in a fast food after races and sat alone in her car, radio playing, "relieved, relieved, impressed by my efficiency."
The years of the White House are the period over which Obama has had the least time to think. There are times when she moves quickly and others where she recites her methodical approach to planning her first-lady programs, intentionally focusing her "Let'Sw Move" initiative on children in order to avoid being accused of going beyond its objectives. She says the firewall between the First Lady's office and West Wing was solid – mentioning that her husband had only called her to the Oval Office once. It was after the tragic shootings in Newtown. They both cried, and she associates gun violence with gunfights in her hometown and expresses her disbelief at Congress' inability to pass a gun control legislature.
In terms of his influence on Barack Obama's policies and plans, there is no indication that he has sought to influence decisions or serve as an informal advisor. Instead, family time has become sacred; global problems set aside in favor of college tales. After the family dinners, he had his briefing notebooks and she had hers.
The main example of a conflict between Obama and the West Wing was to reject the constant concern of her husband's advisers about optics. From the beginning of their stay at the White House, she plans to launch a halloween party for the public and military families, despite the concerns of key collaborators in the West Wing, including David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, according to which she would be perceived as too spectacular. in times of economic decline.
The children were flocking to the White House grounds, a scene that would recur throughout her first-lady tenure, when she also invited school children into the East Hall for workshops and to Girl Scouts for a campout on the lawn and many other events.
"In my case, the optics were perfect," she wrote this first night.
Michelle Obama hosts a round table with students from Ballou STAY High School in Washington. (Chuck Kennedy)
Throughout the bookObama said she remained suspicious of the political press and the public "look" and sometimes felt intimidated, stereotyped and poorly served – especially during her husband's campaign. in 2008.
"If I had learned something about the ugliness of the campaign, the countless ways people had tried to criticize me for anger or make it doubtful was that public judgment was needed to fill everything empty. . . . I knew that I would never allow myself to take it back. "
Long before the others at the White House, she and her team used pop culture, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to promote her initiatives, shape her public brand, and take ownership of her story. She propelled her own popularity.
Obama's caution extends to parts of his memoirs. There is a part of herself that she withholds. She has a sacred circle of sister friends who, she says, have kept her at the White House, but she only mentions them briefly. She talks about the anchor influence of her mother and explains how to raise her own daughters has transformed her. But she is careful not to divulge all the superficial details of their lives in Washington.
His book, published a week after the midterm elections, will spark conversation as Democrats seek a flag bearer for the 2020 general election. She seeks to end the calls for her to run for office. I have never been a supporter of politics and my experience of the last ten years has done little to change that. I continue to be put off by wickedness. "
From Trump, she adds her "body buzzing with fury" after hearing the hot micro-band in which he boasted of grabbing women. "It was an expression of hatred that had generally not been discredited, but which still lived in the bowels of our supposedly enlightened society – alive and well enough accepted that someone like Donald Trump could afford to." Be cavalier about it. block his election.
Michele Norris, Obama's friend and former NPR leader, who will soon be questioning the former first lady on her reading tour in Boston, said the memoir was about more than politics; it contains "lessons of real life".
"She's honest about the difficulty of making the transition. She honestly talks about relationships with people who doubt her or underestimate her, "says Norris. "She is honest about the work that goes into relationships of all kinds."
[ad_2]
Source link
