The Pivot Point: Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’
This was my pivot point, my moment of self-arrest. Like a climber about to slip off an icy peak, I drove my axe into the ground.
Despite coming from one of the public figures closest in proximity to the heart of US politics over the last two decades, Becoming is far from a political polemic. Rather it is a deeply personal memoir charting Michelle Obama’s life from her childhood street in Chicago through her father’s illness and her years at Princeton and Harvard, to the morning she was tasked with mentoring a hotshot lawyer with a “funny name” also fresh out of Harvard, and the evolution of their relationship through IVF, marriage counselling, and more as she left the corporate world for public service and a gargantuan slash in salary even as she started her own family. They were two diametrically opposed characters united by their common purpose to leave the world in a better shape than how they found it.
At the core of the book is her lengthy existential philosophising on her struggle to perceive herself as “good enough” and her relentless pursuit of a meaningful life, a bone-deep desire that influenced every decision in her life (reminiscent in that regard of When Breath Becomes Air, another favourite memoir).
Her account of her husband’s meteoric rise makes for surreal and depressingly nostalgic reading in 2020, his road to the senate “paved with four-leaf clovers” as the competition was cleared out by sex scandals. As a senator for Illinois, he then may never have turned his sights to the White House were it not for Hurricane Katrina, a catastrophe that pitched the deep divisions fracturing the country into stark, devastating relief.
The moment he rocketed into political superstardom came when John Carey asked him to speak at the 2004 DNC and his rousing ode to the “audacity of hope” rang out like a battle cry across the nation, prompting headlines the following morning like “I’ve just seen the first Black President of the United States” and “run, Barack, run”. The apex of the campaign against John McCain also saw the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a financial crisis that spurred him on even further as voters turned towards what was perceived as a radical alternative to the establishment.
From the announcement of his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois in February 2007:
“The genius of our founders is that they designed a system of government that can be changed. And we should take heart, because we’ve changed this country before. In the face of tyranny, a band of patriots brought an Empire to its knees. In the face of secession, we unified a nation and set the captives free. In the face of Depression, we put people back to work and lifted millions out of poverty. We welcomed immigrants to our shores, we opened railroads to the west, we landed a man on the moon, and we heard a King’s call to let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
To even begin to compare this to literally anything that spews out of the current president’s mouth is to bid sweet farewell to whatever passing resemblance to reason and reality we have left.
The dominant reference to this speech in Becoming is Michelle Obama’s anxious scramble to find hats for Malia and Sasha suitable for February in Illinois, which lingered at a balmy -10. Now the top-rated comments on this speech on YouTube are all from readers who came to see just that.
She describes the role of the First Lady as “a strange sidecar to the presidency” with no salary and no handbook, every single one in history having embarked on a different degree of responsibility and general involvement. She also already knew she’d be measured by a different yard stick, “assigned other by default”.
They arrived on the doorstep of their new home with only each other, the audacity of hope, and their codenames: Renegade, Renaissance, Radiance, Rosebud, and Raindance.
Soon she had to contend with the cognitive dissonance of realising she was now married to “one of the most heavily guarded humans on earth”, from the tank disguised as a limo with its cannons, sharpshooters, and the ventilation system designed to withstand a biological attack, to the vast vanguard that accompanied him everywhere decked out with its helicopters, visible machine guns, personal physicians, and even gallons of compatible blood in case he needed an emergency transfusion.
Of all her experiences across her eight years as FLOTUS, she speaks most passionately of the Let’s Move initiative, a high-octane campaign she founded and spearheaded to eliminate child obesity in the US within a generation, launched from the White House garden she’d created to grow fresh fruit and veg to donate to local homeless charities.
Another memorable WH chapter begins with the day a petting zoo was set up for the Obama family on the south lawn with a lion, a tiger, a panther, and a cheetah in unleashed attendance. When the latter attacked, the tranquilliser dart shot by a secret service agent ended up lodged in Sasha’s arm instead… and then Michelle O woke up. The stress dream became an allegory for her loss of control.
Becoming covers Barack Obama’s biggest presidential touchstones and tragedies from the Nobel to Deepwater Horizon to OBL to Trayvon to the shutdown to Sandy Hook to Pulse to Trump. “His was the first presidency of a new era, one involving the disruption and dismantling of all norms around privacy,” she writes at one point, echoing the impassioned words of Sam Seaborn in The West Wing two decades earlier as he implores the President to choose the visionary not the dubious moderate in his first nomination to the Supreme Court.
All in all it makes for relentlessly fascinating reading.
