Worth A Read Yes
Length 426
Quick Review Becoming is the story of how Michelle Obama grew from a little girl on the South Side Chicago to an icon, a role model.
I read this during Black History Month, but life wouldn’t let me sit in one place long enough to sit and write. It is the first book review of Women’s History Month. Apropos since she has done so much for women and women of color in this country and around the world.
Michelle Obama is funny, complex, intelligent, thoughtful, realistic, loyal, hopefully, and more. It’s so easy to water down a person to the image presented by the media; more often than not, she was left to be the woman standing behind the man in the white house. Up until Becoming, I knew very little about her life outside of the basics. I loved her as the symbol of hope and change she has been for myself and others. As a human, I didn’t really know who she was. As I turned each page, I saw a great deal of my own qualities in her. Type-A, reader, observer, sense of humor, and not wanting to veer from the path but needing to. Michelle Obama is relatable; someone just about anyone could sit down and have tea with.
For those wanting a book about Barack Obama, he’s written his own. This is about Michelle. Barack shows up because he is a part of her story, but he is a supporting character. She does not let him over take her story, nor does she speak for him. She is telling her story, and she is a force.
Michelle Obama grew up on the South Side Chicago, watching the neighborhood change from diverse to predominantly black. From a young age, seh was filled with a drive to reach and garner approval from those around her. She studied vigorously and “miserably at my desk, in my puke-green chair – puke green being the official color of the 1970s…” not only proving her sense of humor but her strength of will to withstand such visual torture. After reaching her entire childhood with the support of her parents, she attended Princeton before Harvard Law to become a lawyer in a law firm in downtown Chicago, where she would mentor and fall in love with her husband.
There is a vulnerability and strength in her story. Struggle was a part of her life from an early age. Growing up black in a city not known for its kindness towards the black population. Her father battled MS. She was a minority in the Ivy League universities she attended and battled discrimination and low expectations her entire life. Michelle Obama spoke about the decision to leave the law after working so hard to get there. It’s a conversation people don’t often have, but I don’t know anyone who hasn’t fought that battle internally. There were so many moments of humanity, vulnerability, and relatability throughout whether it was miscarriage, in vitro, marriage, family, and career. It’s hard not to feel like you know this woman. Very few people can relate or even know the first thing about being on a presidential campaign trail. What most people can relate to is the stress careers can place on a relationship and family. The struggle to support a significant other when it means letting go of hopes and dreams to create new ones. Michelle Obama makes the unrelatable universally relatable.
This story isn’t just hers, though. Through herself, Obama is telling the story of people of color and more specifically women of color. The problem and cyclic nature of the angry black woman, “The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.” How hatred is incessant and often unfounded, but through acts of kindness and listening, “I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.” The fact that creating minor change is difficult, but creating large scale change to affect a great number of people, “It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.” The Obamas were reaching to make the world a better place for everyone because they understood the struggle intimately.
When you’re a public figure, it can be hard to be honest and vulnerable, but Michelle Obama does it with sincerity and an open heart. She tackles the struggles women and minorities face, the problems in society and policy, racism and hatred, and more with kindness and honesty. It was a sad day when she and her husband left the white house for many reasons. I love and admire her honesty about the awfullness of Trump and what his presence in the White House means, especially following her husband’s presidency.
Throughout Becoming, Michelle Obama reveals herself to be a strong, resilient, intelligent, driven woman with kindness, empathy, and tenderness flowing through her every action. Though she may have not had the same big picture change in mind her husband did, the ripples she created in society have been felt as strongly if not more strongly because of her character, compassion, and willingness to be human, accessibly so.
Memorable Quotes
“I just wanted to achieve. Or maybe I didn’t want to be dismissed as incapable of achieving.”
School counselor telling her she wasn’t Princeton material, “Had I decided to believe her, her pronouncement would have toppled my confidence all over again, reviving the old thrum of not enough, not enough.”
About men: “Hearing them, I realized that they weren’t smarter than the rest of us. They were simply emboldened, floating on an ancient tide of superiority, buoyed by the fact that history had never told them anything different.”
On the pain of miscarrying and speaking with friends, “helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.”
bisous und обьятий,
RaeAnna
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Title: Becoming
Author: Michelle Obama
Publisher: Crown
Copyright: 2018
ISBN: 9781524763138
