Michelle Obama's Becoming is a master class in walking the First Lady Tightrope

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Michelle Obama’s Becoming is a master class in walking the First Lady Tightrope
As a political memoir, it’s safe. As a piece of image-making, it’s brilliant.
By Constance Grady@constancegrady Nov 13, 2018, 1:35pm EST


A successful memoir from a former first lady must walk a fine line.

It must create a sense of intimacy with readers, by letting them into the presidential marriage and revealing a few secrets, but it must also preserve a certain distance, to keep the presidential family private and aspirational. It must spend enough time on politics to help build a narrative around the president’s legacy, but not so much time that people feel threatened — antiquated though that feeling might be — by the idea that the first lady might have political aspirations of her own.

It must create a case for the first lady as a compelling figure in her own right, someone who is worth reading a whole book about — but it must also reckon with her marriage and her presidential husband, because after all, that’s generally the reason the first lady is famous enough for you to be reading a book about her in the first place.

Becoming, the new memoir from Michelle Obama, walks the First Lady Tightrope with Obama’s characteristic aplomb. It is not a daring book; it is for the most part a safe and anodyne political memoir that does not aspire to any more ambitious territory.

But it is enormously effective at distilling Obama’s poise, intelligence, and warmth into a single 421-page package; at evoking the idea of the Obama marriage as an aspirational partnership while letting us in on just a few secrets; at arguing that Michelle Obama and her ability to wield soft power is worthy of being discussed as more than an accessory for her presidential husband. At its most compelling, the book delves wholeheartedly into Obama’s ambivalence about her status as a political wife.

Michelle Obama’s greatest aspiration before her husband ran for office, she writes, was to find a way to simultaneously live the life of both of her childhood heroes: her mother, Marian Robinson, and Mary Richards, Mary Tyler Moore’s character on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

She’s a self-described control freak who craves order and stability and wants to build a stable home life for her children, the way her mother did for her, but she is also ambitious and independent, like Mary. “I wanted to have a work life and a home life, but with some promise that one would never fully squelch the other,” she writes. “I hoped to be exactly like my own mother and at the same time nothing like her at all.”

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https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/11/13/18091388/michelle-obama-becoming-review