Michelle Obama’s memoir is a call to action

Becoming. By Michelle Obama. Crown Publishing Group; 448 pages; $32.50. Viking; £25.

BEING A FIRST Lady, writes Michelle Obama in her candid, engaging memoir, is “not technically a job, nor is it an official government title. It comes with no salary and no spelled-out set of obligations.” Many of the women who held that title before her had already been conditioned to the odd role of political spouse. But her husband had been a senator for just four years before he won the presidency in 2008. And there had never been a First Lady who looked like Mrs Obama.

“Not for one second”, she writes, reflecting on the interlude between Barack Obama’s victory and inauguration, “did I think I’d be sliding into some glamorous, easy role. Nobody who has the words ‘first’ and ‘black’ attached to them ever would.” Yet she performed her duties with dignity and compassion. To read her reflections is to recall and hope for a better America.

Mrs Obama is a product of the South Side of Chicago. Her father worked for the city, tending boilers at a water-filtration plant; her mother stayed at home while Mrs Obama and her brother were young. Her family was stable and rooted; by contrast, her husband barely knew his father and was brought up in Hawaii by his white Kansan grandparents while his mother was in Indonesia. She is frank about the impact of that difference on their relationship; the way it first threatened to destabilise, but has ultimately enriched, their marriage and family.

She depicts the hard task of being an intelligent, ambitious, private woman married to an intelligent man, whose own ambition leads him to the world’s most public career. The future president initially failed to impress her, arriving late for his first day at the law firm where she was his mentor, then lighting a cigarette after their first lunch together. Others at the firm swooned, but, she writes wryly, “in my experience, you put a suit on any half-intelligent black man and white people tended to go bonkers.” But he was charming, and “oddly free from doubt”; in a sure sign of compatibility, both loathed “Les Misérables” enough to leave early.

In “Becoming”, Mrs Obama pulls back the curtains around their lives in a way she could not while Mr Obama was in office. She describes the pain of a miscarriage and the benefits of couples counselling, guided by a therapist who “separat[ed] out our weapons from our wounds”. Besides her lovely turn of phrase, she is a gifted and empathetic observer. The portrait of Fraser Robinson, her loving and stoical father, who died long before she became First Lady and retained his gentle good humour as his body failed, is particularly moving.

She is unsparing, though, about the current occupant of the White House, who surfaced in politics at the end of Mr Obama’s first term “to offer yammering, inexpert critiques of Barack’s foreign-policy decisions and openly questioning whether he was an American citizen.” She worried that Donald Trump’s stirring of xenophobic bigotry put her family at risk, “and for this, I’d never forgive him.” She attended his inauguration but, as pictures of that day show, “I stopped even trying to smile.”

Above all, the book brings home how fundamentally opposed her and her husband’s vision of America is to Mr Trump’s. His is angrily revanchist, intent on stoking fear and exploiting division. He is a demagogically gifted campaigner but appears to have little interest in governing or policy. Mrs Obama, by contrast, is a wary campaigner, easily stung by the wilful distortions of the right-wing press, who called her “Obama’s Baby Mama” and mistook her serious expression for anger.

Yet she found her voice during the campaign of 2008, among rural Iowans “who despite the difference in skin colour reminded me of my family”—blue-collar strivers who wanted better lives for their children. They may since have voted for Mr Trump, but Mrs Obama’s memoir is a reminder that Democrats can and should try to win such voters back. “Let’s invite one another in,” she writes. “There’s grace in being willing to know and hear others.”