Michelle Obama’s new book Becoming tackles marriage, politics, and ambition

In Brooklyn’s Barclays Center a few days before Christmas, Michelle Obama invited more than 19,000 of her closest friends to join her for what was billed as “an intimate conversation.” It was the final stop of the first leg of the national tour she’s traveling on to promote her memoir, Becoming (demand for tickets was so high that the tour will pick up again in February and continue into May) — and the crowd was so large that for all intents and purposes, the line to get inside began at the steps to exit the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center subway stop. For a full block around the stadium, the air was electric with anticipation of a close encounter with the former first lady.

“I’m excited to see Michelle Obama in a more personal light. I haven’t read her book yet, but I’ve heard great things about it, and that she really goes in depth into her experience in being in the White House and watching the girls get raised in the White House,” said Carina Baker, waiting in line to approach a security checkpoint. “And also just this perspective of a black woman who got to hold office in the highest position in our country.”

Real talk: By far the most endearing thing in Michelle Obama’s new memoir Becoming is that she seizes absolutely every opportunity she has to brutally drag her husband. Barack Obama may be America’s first black president and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, but Michelle Obama is never going to let the world forget that he wore a Miami Vice suit in the ’80s and was late for his first day of work when she was his boss.

It’s endearing — and it’s also effective. Part of what a first lady memoir is traditionally supposed to do is convince readers of the authenticity of the presidential marriage, to make us believe that these two people genuinely like and trust each other, and that we in turn should like and trust them. The Obamas have always been exceptionally gifted at presenting their relationship to the public as a genuine romantic partnership that deserves America’s respect and admiration — remember when they danced to “At Last” at the inauguration ball in 2008? — and Becoming only serves to crystallize that image.

Michelle Obama joined the ranks of former first ladies turned authors on Tuesday with the launch of her new memoir, Becoming.

During her husband’s presidency, Michelle Obama was nearly always more popular than he was. She was a master at walking what Vox’s Constance Grady calls the “First Lady Tightrope” — being effective without being threatening; supporting her husband while keeping up a separate identity — and that balancing act carries over to her memoir.

Leading up to their engagement, Michelle and Barack Obama had very different ideas of what marriage should be.

“He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions,” Michelle Obama writes in her memoir Becoming, released on Tuesday. “For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal.”

Decades before becoming the first black woman to serve as first lady, Michelle Obama was already navigating a complex web of expectations about race and gender. In her new memoir Becoming, she opens up about these expectations and how they affected her.

An early moment came during Obama’s childhood in Chicago, when she was sitting with other young girls. “At one point one of the girls, a second, third, or fourth cousin of mine, gave me a sideways look and said, just a touch hotly, ‘How come you talk like a white girl?,’” she writes.

A successful memoir from a former first lady must walk a fine line.

It must create a sense of intimacy with readers, by letting them into the presidential marriage and revealing a few secrets, but it must also preserve a certain distance, to keep the presidential family private and aspirational. It must spend enough time on politics to help build a narrative around the president’s legacy, but not so much time that people feel threatened — antiquated though that feeling might be — by the idea that the first lady might have political aspirations of her own.

The cover of Michelle Obama’s newly released memoir, Becoming, shows the former first lady leaning forward, a big smile on her face. She wears a loose white top that dips off one shoulder, and her hair falls in the beachy waves that many have tried and failed to replicate via YouTube tutorial. The pale blue background is nearly the same hue as in the Amy Sherald portrait of her that hangs in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; as in that painting, she rests a manicured hand under her chin.

This is Michelle Obama, post-White House: approachable, casual, but still eminently polished and aspirational.