Becoming

The summary

At her first piano recital, Michelle Robinson sat down at a gleaming baby grand and froze. She knew the song cold. What stopped her was the keyboard: eighty-eight flawless keys, every one identical. She had learned on her great-aunt Robbie’s battered upright, where middle C had a corner chipped out the size of a fingernail, and that chip was how her hands found home. Robbie, the taskmaster she’d fought for years, walked up and laid one finger on middle C.

That scene carries the book. Becoming isn’t a White House chronicle; it’s an argument about what a self is. It opens by attacking the most ordinary question adults ask children: What do you want to be when you grow up? “As if growing up is finite,” she writes. “As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”

The box checker

She was raised on one mechanism: effort in, result out. Her father, Fraser, tended boilers at the water plant and never complained as multiple sclerosis took his legs. Her mother, Marian, said things like “I’m not raising babies. I’m raising adults.” When a high school counselor glanced at her transcript and said, “I’m not sure that you’re Princeton material,” Obama didn’t argue. She switched methods without changing the goal, got a recommendation from a neighbor who knew her, and got in.

The mechanism delivered. Princeton, where black students made up under 9 percent of her class and she felt like a poppy seed in a bowl of rice. Harvard Law, which she squeaked into off the wait list and which bored her. Then Sidley & Austin: the forty-seventh floor, an assistant at twenty-five, an Armani suit, a Saab, legal custody of Barney the Dinosaur. She calls that self a “half-closeted CEO,” marching to “the resolute beat of effort/result, effort/result.” She also names the flaw: caring what others think “can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.”

What effort couldn’t buy

Then the mechanism failed, three times running. Suzanne, her college roommate, died of lymphoma at twenty-six, days after her mother died of an unrelated cancer, while Obama billed hours downtown and told herself the work was important. Her father went into the hospital by ambulance and died ten days later at fifty-five, too weak to speak, kissing the back of her hand instead. Life is short, she concluded, and she didn’t want to be remembered for corporate trademarks.

So she swerved — in the manner of a box checker, naturally. She typed letters of introduction to foundations and nonprofits across Chicago and met anyone who’d have lunch, less to find a job than to see what was possible. It led to city hall under Valerie Jarrett, then to launching the Chicago chapter of Public Allies, where she had to negotiate the salary up: $600 a month in student loans meant she couldn’t afford the offer. By that fall she’d placed twenty-seven young people in paid apprenticeships.

Fertility offered no method at all. After a miscarriage and months of failure, she writes the sentence that undoes her upbringing: “Fertility is not something you conquer. Rather maddeningly, there’s no straight line between effort and reward.” She gave herself the IVF shots alone in the bathroom while Barack was in Springfield, and felt her first flicker of resentment at how unequally the cost was landing.

Her happiness stopped being someone else’s job

With two small girls and a state senator husband, “I’m on my way” had become a state of mind rather than a location. She’d hold dinner, light candles, and go to bed furious. Counseling was her idea; Barack thought he could reason it out with a book from Borders. She expected the counselor she calls Dr. Woodchurch to validate grievances that were, as she saw it, all entirely valid. She got none. “No sides were taken.”

The revelation is the most useful thing in the book. She’d been assembling evidence “like a Harvard-trained lawyer” for the case that everything was unfair, so she tried a different hypothesis: she was more in charge of her happiness than she’d allowed. Her mother started arriving at 4:45 a.m. so she could make a 5:00 workout. Dinner moved to 6:30 and stayed there, with or without Barack. “We didn’t wait for Dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.”

Being defined, or defining back

In February 2008 she told a Milwaukee crowd that hope was making a comeback and that “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.” Someone cut forty minutes to ten seconds. The clip made her unpatriotic, and “angry black woman” stuck for years. Christopher Hitchens dug up her Princeton thesis and wrote that it “wasn’t written in any known language.” Her conclusion was tactical: “If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”

So she defined. A vegetable garden on the South Lawn the West Wing considered bad optics. Let’s Move!, aimed at ending childhood obesity within a generation and announced in 2010 with commitments already extracted from school-lunch suppliers, beverage makers and a dozen sports leagues. And in 2016, the line her family had lived by: when they go low, we go high. Underneath runs a call-and-response she first needed as a scared ninth grader: Am I good enough? Yes I am.

The bottom line

Effort built Obama a ladder and carried her to the top — and none of the things that actually formed her responded to effort at all: grief, a marriage under strain, a body that wouldn’t cooperate, a country deciding on her behalf who she was. Her answer isn’t to stop striving. It’s to stop treating a self as a finish line: “At fifty-four, I am still in progress, and I hope that I always will be.”

Read it if you’ve climbed something you’re no longer sure you wanted, or want an honest accounting of what public life costs a family.