Becoming

Review by Abeer Hoque

I had heard from a friend that listening to Michelle Obama’s Becoming was like being in a conversation with friends. So I eschewed my normal e-book ways and splurged for the Audible book. I wasn’t disappointed. Obama’s Chicago accent and plain-spoken eloquence was a joy to listen to. I especially loved her account of her childhood, growing up on the Southside, overcoming much to get where she did. I commend her wise and unflappable mother for encouraging much of her early success: “Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck [my mother] as a rich person’s conceit.”

Obama’s gracious yet frank take on our country’s institutionalized racism, which kept (and keeps) so many black families down through the centuries, should be required reading for all Americans, especially for those whites who are too fragile to read the book White Fragility. She manages to sound non-threatening throughout, but still make her points about “the ancient tide of superiority” clearly and compellingly: “…that flimsy line that separated getting by and going under.”

Her budding romance with Barack was especially delicious, and I appreciated her later realizations about couples counseling, setting boundaries, and being responsible for your own happiness. I cried buckets at her tender stories about her kind and resilient father (who had MS and died quite early).

The political parts of the book were a little slower, although the lead up to Barack’s first term as president was exciting to read (and depressing, considering where we are now). Obama is blunt about “the acute burden of being female” and the ways first ladies as well as women in politics are denigrated and limited and pigeonholed. She is especially incensed and disappointed in Trump’s candidacy and election, despite his unabashed misogyny and his myriad prejudices: “The easiest way to disregard a woman’s voice is to package her as a scold.”

I’ve long admired Obama’s quote, “When they go low, we go high.” But I’m now enamored of a few more that feel more doable, less despairing, than having to go high when someone goes low. Especially now, when the bar is subterranean.

One gem came out of her lifelong work with girls and young women, both in America, and worldwide. She is so overcome with the hope and resilience and creativity of a group of young African women leaders that she says, “They made me feel old, in the best possible way.” I love this contextualization, this honoring of what’s to come, what’s already here. It places all of us on a continuum, an arc, if you will, that’s curving up.

The other line that resonated hard with me was her emphasis on dignity as an essential human quality: “Dignity is a choice.” I think dignity may a better rallying call than going high, because it doesn’t require explicit sacrifice. It doesn’t mean you turn the other cheek. It doesn’t ask you to either fight or stand down. It could be all of those things. Or it could be something else. Either way, you try to do what you do in a way that allows you to hold your head up high. And that seems to me, in the end, the best grace of all.

Becoming
Michelle Obama
Crown Publishing Group
ISBN: 978-1524763138