Michelle Obama memoirs: five things we learned

Former first lady Michelle Obama has revealed intimate details about her life in a newly published memoir.

The book, titled Becoming, covers the time before, during and after her husband Barack’s eight years as president. Here are five things we learned.

Why she will never forgive Trump

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In an extract that she read to ABC News, the former first lady explains why she will never forgive Donald Trump for his hateful “birther” campaign against her husband in 2011, when Republicans questioned whether the then president was actually a US citizen.

“It was... dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks... Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this, I’d never forgive him,” she writes.

A purposeful frown

Obama says she was unable and unwilling to put on a happy face at Trump’s inauguration, in January last year.

“I will always wonder about what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified female candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president,” she says. “I stopped even trying to smile.”

Coming into her identity

The first section of the memoir details her childhood growing up in a “cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago”, with parents who pushed her to work hard and excel at school.

A dedicated student, Obama later attended the Princeton University, where she stood out on the Ivy League campus, reports the NPR news site.

The university had launched a diversity campaign and “the hope was that all of us would mingle in heterogeneous harmony”, Obama writes. However, she says, the burden was put on the minority students for that to work.

She faced further problems of stereotyping after her husband announced his run for president in 2007.

“I was female, black and strong, which to certain people ... translated only to ‘angry’. It was another damaging cliche, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room,” she says.

Doubts during campaign

The former first lady admits she was apprehensive about joining the 2008 campaign trail during her husband’s first presidential race, not least because of the stress it put on her family, according to The Guardian.

“I said yes because I believed that Barack could be a great president... I said yes because I loved him and had faith in what he could do,” she writes.

Being a ‘first’ First Lady

Obama was wary of becoming the first African-American first lady of the US, but says she was met with overwhelming support.

“I was ‘other’ almost by default. If there was a presumed grace assigned to my white predecessors, I knew it wasn’t likely to be the same for me,” she explains.

Yet outgoing first lady Laura Bush was quick to offer a hand of friendship, telling Obama that she was only a phone call away.

Recalling that time in Becoming, she says: “This was all heartening. I already looked forward to the day I could pass whatever wisdom I picked up to the next first lady in line.”

She offered to do exactly that for Melania Trump, but has yet to be taken up on the offer, Obama recently told ABC News.