Becoming

A book in three parts

Becoming is Michelle Obama's memoir of her life from a small apartment on the South Side of Chicago to eight years as First Lady of the United States. She divides it into three parts. Becoming Me covers her childhood, school and early career. Becoming Us covers her marriage to Barack Obama and the years of his rise in politics. Becoming More covers the White House years and what came after.

The title carries the book's main idea. Obama does not see a life as a finished product. She sees it as a process of growth that never ends. The question adults ask children, "What do you want to be when you grow up?", strikes her as the wrong question, because it assumes that at some point you arrive and stop. Her book argues the opposite: you keep becoming, at every age.

Becoming Me: Euclid Avenue and the South Side

Michelle Robinson grows up in a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a house on Euclid Avenue. Her great-aunt Robbie owns the house and lives downstairs. Robbie teaches piano, and young Michelle takes lessons from her. Their clashes over how to learn a piece are an early sign of Michelle's stubborn will.

Her father, Fraser, works at the city water filtration plant. He has multiple sclerosis, and the disease slowly takes his ability to walk. He never complains and never misses work. Her mother, Marian, runs the home with calm and firm sense. She teaches her children to think for themselves and to speak up. Her older brother, Craig, is a gifted student and athlete, and Michelle measures herself against him.

The neighborhood changes as she grows. White families leave as Black families arrive, a pattern she later understands as white flight. Schools lose resources. She sees how quickly a community can be written off, and how much the label of a "bad" neighborhood shapes what outsiders expect from the children who live there.

She tests into Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, a long bus ride from home. Then she applies to Princeton. A school counselor tells her she is probably not "Princeton material." She applies anyway and gets in. That moment becomes a theme of the book: the voice, inside and outside, that asks "Am I good enough?" Her answer, built slowly over years, is yes.

At Princeton she is one of a small number of Black students. She feels the weight of being "the only one" in many rooms. She finds community at the Third World Center, a cultural center for students of color, and in friendships with other students who feel like outsiders. Her senior thesis studies how Black Princeton graduates relate to the Black community after college.

She goes on to Harvard Law School and then to the Chicago law firm Sidley & Austin. By the standard measures she has made it. She has a good salary, a corner of the corporate world and a clear track. She calls herself a box-checker: a person who moves from one achievement to the next without asking whether she wants the next box. The work at the firm is steady and well paid, but she finds little meaning in it. She senses that something is missing, though she cannot yet name it.

Becoming Us: meeting Barack

In 1989 the firm assigns her to mentor a summer associate from Harvard Law. His name is Barack Obama. She expects to dislike him because of the hype around him. Instead she finds him calm, curious and unlike anyone she has known. He talks about big ideas and the gap between the world as it is and the world as it should be. She goes with him to a meeting at a church basement on the South Side, where he speaks to residents as a former community organizer. She sees that his interest in public life is real. They start to date.

Two losses then shake her. Her close friend from Princeton, Suzanne Alele, dies of cancer at a young age. Soon after, her father dies. Both deaths push her to ask what she is doing with her one life. She decides to leave corporate law.

She takes a job in Chicago City Hall, working for Valerie Jarrett. Later she becomes the founding executive director of the Chicago office of Public Allies, a program that trains young people for careers in public service. Then she works at the University of Chicago and its medical center, building ties between the institutions and the neighborhoods around them. She finds work that fits her values, even though it pays less.

Barack and Michelle marry in 1992. She describes their differences openly. He is a night owl who needs time alone with his books. She wants structure, routine and presence. She writes about a miscarriage, a subject she says women rarely discuss, and about using IVF to conceive their daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Barack enters politics, first in the Illinois State Senate. She is skeptical of politics. She sees it as a field that rewards ego and wears down families. His work keeps him away for long periods, and she often feels like a single parent. She writes that they went to couples counseling, and that it taught her that she could not expect him to make her happy. She had to build her own happiness, with or without him at the dinner table.

She makes a decision that defines this period. She puts her own well-being first in practical ways: she starts going to the gym early in the morning and arranges her life so it does not wait on his schedule.

The 2008 campaign and the caricature

When Barack runs for president, she becomes a public figure overnight. She campaigns hard. She also learns how quickly a few words can be twisted. A remark that "for the first time in my adult life" she was really proud of her country becomes a weapon. Critics and cable news paint her as an angry Black woman, a caricature she finds both painful and absurd.

Her response is to work on how she presents herself without changing who she is. She tells more stories about her family. She speaks to voters as a mother and a daughter. She learns that she cannot control the caricature, but she can refuse to become it.

Becoming More: the White House years

As First Lady she has no salary, no job description and enormous attention. She decides to use the platform for causes she can act on. She plants the White House Kitchen Garden with local schoolchildren. She launches Let's Move!, a campaign against childhood obesity that works on school meals, physical activity and food labels. With Jill Biden she starts Joining Forces, which supports military families. She later backs Reach Higher, which encourages young people to pursue education after high school, and Let Girls Learn, which supports education for girls around the world.

She also works hard to give her daughters a normal childhood inside a house with Secret Service agents, staff and cameras. She fights for sleepovers, school events and small freedoms. She describes the "bubble" that cuts the family off from ordinary life.

The book covers moments of grief. She writes about the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and about meeting the family of Hadiya Pendleton, a teenager shot in Chicago shortly after performing at the second inauguration. These events show her the limits of what a president can change and the cost of gun violence in communities like the one she grew up in.

She also describes the race and gender scrutiny that never goes away. Her clothes, her arms, her tone and her facial expressions are all judged. She learns to plan each public appearance with care, because any small slip can become a story. She chooses to accept this as part of the job and to keep the focus on her causes.

Leaving the White House

The book ends on Inauguration Day in January 2017, when the Obamas leave the White House. She describes the strange relief of being an ordinary citizen again, and the small joys of making toast in her own kitchen and opening a window without asking permission.

In the epilogue she returns to the book's central idea. She is no longer First Lady, but she does not see herself as finished. She still asks what comes next. She urges readers to share their stories, listen to the stories of others, and treat their own lives as unfinished work. She says she has no plans to run for office.

She writes about the 2016 election with open dismay. She criticizes Donald Trump for promoting the birther conspiracy about her husband, which she says put her family's safety at risk. At the Democratic National Convention that year she uses the line her family lives by: "When they go low, we go high." She means that you answer cruelty with dignity, not with more cruelty.

What the critics say

Most reviewers praise the book's warmth and detail about her early life. Some note that it says little about policy disputes or the more contested decisions of the Obama administration, and that its view of the White House years is selective, as most political memoirs are.

Who should read it

Read it if you want a first-hand account of a modern American life that crosses class, race and power, or if you feel like an outsider in the rooms you work in. It also suits anyone at a turning point who wants permission to change course.