Becoming

Becoming is organized around three phases of Michelle Obama’s life: her upbringing, her relationship with Barack Obama and the early years of their marriage and careers, and the White House years. She writes about race and class with the specificity of someone who grew up working-class and Black in a city that enforced both divisions rigidly. She writes about the White House without nostalgia—honest about the isolation, the constraints on her work and movement, the ways the role of First Lady was simultaneously enormous and oddly limiting. The book sold over fourteen million copies, which partly reflects how many people had been waiting for her version of the story. It’s a thoughtful account of what it actually meant to grow up Black in mid-century Chicago, work in corporate law, and then find yourself living in a building built by enslaved labor as the first Black First Lady.