Who is Michelle Obama? Is she only the first African-American First Lady of the United States, as we know her, or is she something more? What’s her story? How did she become what she became? And has she ever stopped becoming something? Since growing up isn’t finite, can we really become something and that would be the end of it. Whoever this fine lady is, she is surely someone who has a lot she wants to say. And that is what this book is about; the journey of a lady who reached the world’s most famous address, how she lived there, and the ways in which she’s finding herself again after walking out from that door one last time.
“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
Michelle in this book tells the story of her life, and she also tells something about stories we carry with us:
“Even when it’s not pretty or perfect. Even when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”
At the beginning of this year, I read Barack Obama’s Biography A Promised Land. A treatise on Presidency, what does it mean to be a President? The book soon lead me to read another book on leadership and politics by Obama’s appointed FBI Director. It was inevitable that sooner or later I’d get my hands on Becoming, Michelle Obama’s memoir. While I was hoping to learn more about Michelle than Barack in this book, I was disappointed that the later part of the book felt like it was more about him than her, which is something I could understand, but not without feeling irked.
What I loved about this book was Michelle’s storytelling style and her love story with Barack. This book was worth reading for me just for that fact alone, everything else that came along with the book was like the cherry on the cake.