Becoming
Michelle Obama (2018)
“The first Black First Lady reveals that identity is not a destination but a perpetual act of becoming.”
Short Summary
Michelle Robinson grows up on the South Side of Chicago, raised by working-class parents who instill in her the belief that she belongs anywhere. She excels academically at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, Princeton, and Harvard Law, navigating spaces where she is often the only Black woman in the room. At the law firm Sidley Austin, she meets Barack Obama, and their partnership reshapes both their lives. She leaves corporate law for public service, grapples with fertility struggles and marriage strain, and watches her husband's improbable political rise — from state senator to President of the United States. As First Lady, she launches initiatives on childhood nutrition, military families, and girls' education while bearing the weight of being the first Black family in the White House. The memoir closes not with a conclusion but with an insistence that the process of becoming never ends.
Detailed Summary
Michelle LaVaughn Robinson is born in 1964 on the South Side of Chicago, the daughter of Fraser Robinson III, a city pump operator with multiple sclerosis, and Marian Robinson, a homemaker who later becomes a school secretary. The family lives in a small upstairs apartment in Marian's aunt Robbie's ...