This is a well written book. It seemed like it should be an important perspective to hear from, and a reminder of the better days that was the Obama administration. Michelle's vocabulary is excellent, and her speech clear and sometimes beautifully poetic. I was able to borrow Becoming as an audiobook, and I loved that it was read by her.
This was not an easy read (listen) for me. I am finding it easier these days to listen to a book to completion than sit down and read it, but it seemed very long to get to the 18th hour of this book.
I expected to be conflicted, but I didn't expect to dislike her so much. I was expecting honesty with self-reflection. Instead it seemed superficial, as she didn't seem to consider the internal conflicts that must have existed. It seemed weird to me to hear her talk about her life in the same way I had uncomfortably heard others talk with insensitivity in terms of their own advantages. I was unconvinced by her argument that she identified with the Southside of Chicago, and therefore not given to temptation of the privileges afforded her living in the White House for 8 years. It seemed like Barack had the moral compass, or pride to avoid the appearance of entitlement, but she comes across as selfish , inflexible and spoiled (taking from her parents every thing they offered her, next her husband who always seemed to say yes but has his own inflexible ways about him). This led me to conclude that she was either an entitled brat from the get-go, or self-deluded about her extraordinary life as FLOTUS, or worse, a blatant example of white racism and black entitlement from start to finish.
I know how that sounds. It sounds terrible. It makes me uncomfortable to say it. After what has happened in black history in North America, and around the world, it is absolutely necessary to absorb the anger and hurt and deep scars that persist in unconscious and dangerous biases that still exist in too many forums, institutions, and minds to this day, including mine. But I couldn't shake the growing certainty that Michelle Obama has a troubling (is it even unconscious?) bias in the opposite direction. I even wondered sometimes if she realized her "black" husband was also white.
What also bothered me was how a woman with such a personal story, from rags to riches, and calling herself powerful, manages to spend her autobiography over and over confusing her life with her husband's. It would have been easier for me to accept that she wrote a biography of Barack. This bothered me deeply, having just been blown away by Melinda Gates' book The Moment of Lift. Maybe it was not fair in my expectations, as I had not really considered the wife of Bill Gates, or known anything about her public persona, so I could be surprised and impressed with who she was. I was more aware of Michelle as an entity beyond Barack Obama's wife, and had felt she represented an active partner in his presidency. I was truly disappointed. I had to reflect on my own incredible sensitivity and bias to the omnipresent gender inequity in my personal life while carefully interpreting what Michelle must have faced at the intersection of gender and race, but even through these lenses, I didn't feel like I was seeing much of the person of Michelle Obama. She gave captions of her sequential roles (daughter, student, lawyer, advocate, wife, mother, FLOTUS), but never really seemed to show herself. The person I was able to glimpse between the roles, who I was left with, I didn't like very much.
Michelle Obama, like all human subjects, should be a complex character with many stories. She repeatedly insists that she is frank and personal, but she never seems to consider her own internal conflicts. She wants us to believe that she chose a career and her kids stability for the right reasons, but when Barack becomes POTUS, she finally just gives up that same valued career and moves her kids to where her husband lives. I expected her to feel torn in some way, but she gives no hint of regret that she didn't do it years before, nor discuss the difficulties of leaving those paths behind. She says that it was great to have him around every evening with no acknowledgement that it was her decision to stay in Chicago all the years before. Which is it? Did she make a mistake all those years? Or if it was the right thing, how did she deal with giving up all that in order to live in the White House? In another anecdote, she is offered support by the wife of a colleague in DC in preparation for the days ahead, which she rejects, finds judgemental and dismisses as irrelevant, but when her senator husband becomes the president, she then complains that she wasn't prepared enough for the very role that others saw coming, not acknowledging her own hubris in this deficit.
Meanwhile, she went on to minimize the criticisms she should have had for Barack. How his vision completely bulldozed over her independent fulfilling professional and maternal life balance. Instead of exploring this, she blames faceless politics, and talks about going on a wonderful date 4 months into the presidency for the first time, as though having her husband listening through dinner one time could make up for this.
Growing up in South Chicago, with her mother fiercely advocating for her getting an education, and getting out before it got bad, by being accepted to Princeton, and moving out in the way she criticized others for doing, you would think she would find it unfamiliar and at least mildly conflicting to travel to Hawaii for every vacation, or mention the irony in taking private planes and helicopters across multiple states New York restaurant that serves local food (and is impossible to get a table at).
No bad breath on a first kiss with a smoker. Total acceptance of the fluky way her impractical smart husband became the President, who could have been a drain on her feminist psyche if they didn't have the money and staff to clean up after him and cook dinners. He could have just a likely ended up as bum. She got lucky. Her neighbourhood deteriorated but she wasn't living there anymore. She got lucky. But instead of humility and insight, she puts a romantic shine on it, and leaves out all the conflict. The spaces between the lines she writes are so far apart as to appear disingenuous to the reader.
