Becoming

Becoming is Michelle Obama's 2018 memoir, the political-memoir bestseller that sold more than seventeen million copies and is now one of the best-selling autobiographies of the twenty-first century. Obama structures the book in three sections: Becoming Me (her South Side Chicago childhood and her education through Princeton and Harvard Law School), Becoming Us (her professional life in Chicago, her marriage to Barack Obama, the early Senate years), and Becoming More (the White House years and the post-presidency). The 426-page memoir was written without a ghostwriter, the literary-agency record makes clear, and the prose carries the consistent first-person voice of Obama's actual speech-giving register.

What makes Becoming the political memoir it is rather than the political-memoir genre exercise it could have been is Obama's willingness to be specific about the parts of her own life that the genre has historically not engaged with seriously. The chapters on her relationship with Barack (the law-firm summer-associate meet-cute, the marriage counseling early in the marriage, the IVF treatments before Malia's birth) are rendered as one fully realized adult relationship rather than as background to her husband's career. The South Side Chicago childhood chapters are some of the most carefully written prose about late-twentieth-century Black middle-class Chicago available in any major memoir. The White House chapters are restrained in the way historical material this recent requires.

Recommended as required contemporary American political-memoir reading, as the best modern First Lady memoir by a wide margin, and for fans of presidential and First Family memoirs (Bill Clinton's My Life, Barack Obama's A Promised Land, George W. Bush's Decision Points). Michelle Obama's own audiobook narration is the definitive audio production and won the 2020 Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album. Five stars without reservation. Read The Light We Carry (2022) next.