Michelle Obama’s book Becoming: Key takeaways from the former First Lady’s best-selling memoir

As Michelle Obama takes the stage at London's Southbank Centre as part of her book tour, we delve into her already bestselling memoir...
Former First Lady Michelle Obama will be visiting London's Southbank Centre as part of her 13-date book tour
AP
Georgia Chambers3 December 2018

Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming is the best-selling book released this year in the US just 18 days after publication.

The book offers a personal insight into the Obama family, documenting the moment Michelle Obama first met her husband and following their time in the White House.

As well as embarking on a 12-date tour of the US joined by special guests including Oprah Winfrey and Tracee Ellis Ross, the former First Lady will be making a pit stop in the UK at London’s Southbank Centre.

She’ll be joined by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for a 90-minute discussion of the hit book.

While she is here, she will give a talk on education at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson School in Islington, which she visited nine years ago on her first trip to the UK as First Lady.

If you’re curious to see what all the fuss is about before you go and buy the real thing, here are the key takeaways from Michelle Obama’s Becoming...

She was sceptical of Barack Obama at first

AFP/Getty Images

“In my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tend to go bonkers,” she noted.

But once she got to know him, the pair fell in love.

Rather comically, Mrs Obama reveals how her husband proposed.

“As we were reaching the end of the meal, Barack smiled at me and raised the subject of marriage,” Mrs Obama writes.

“He reached for my hand and said that as much as he loved me with his whole being, he still didn’t really see the point.”

To her surprise, her then-future husband handed her a velvet box containing a diamond ring.

“It took me a second to dismantle my anger and slide into joyful shock,” she said.

She had doubts about her husband running for president

New released photos of Michelle Obama through her life

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Although he went on to serve for two terms, Mrs Obama admits she feared her husband's bid for the White House would interfere with family life.

She writes: “In the end, it boiled down to this: I said yes because I believed that Barack could be a great president… I said yes because I loved him and I had faith in what he could do.”

She worried she would feel like an outsider as the first African-American first lady

AFP

“I was ‘other’ almost by default,” she reflects. “If there was a presumed grace assigned to my white predecessors, I knew it wasn’t likely to be the same for me.”

But luckily, entering the White House exceeded her expectations, and former first ladies even offered her their support and advice.

“This was all heartening. I already looked forward to the day I could pass whatever wisdom I picked up to the next First Lady in line.”

The Sandy Hook shooting was the hardest part of her husband's presidency

In the book, Mrs Obama recalls the heart-wrenching moment when news broke of the Sandy Hook shooting, which claimed the lives of 20 students and 6 teachers.

“My husband needed me,” she wrote. “This would be the only time in eight years that he’d request my presence in the middle of a workday, the two of us rearranging our schedules to be alone together for a moment of comfort.”

She added: “Those images were seared permanently into his psyche. I could see in his eyes how broken they’d left him, what this had already done to his faith.”

She had a miscarriage and her daughters were conceived using IVF

In emotional account, Mrs Obama reveals how she was left devastated after suffering a miscarriage.

“A miscarriage is lonely, painful and demoralising almost on a cellular level,” she wrote.

“When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it is also not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriage happens all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence round it.”

The couple went on to use in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive their two daughters, Malia and Sasha.

She won't be running for public office

AP

Many Barack Obama supporters were calling on his wife to stand for the 2020 elections after Donald Trump took the presidency in 2016.

But Mrs Obama makes it clear in the book that she has “no intention of running for office, ever.”

But rest assured she’s not staying completely out of the limelight.

“We all play a role in this democracy,” Mrs Obama wrote. “We need to remember the power of every vote. I continue, too, to keep myself connected to a force that’s larger and more potent than any one election, or leader or news story – and that’s optimism. For me, this is a form of faith, an antidote to fear.”

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