Former first lady Michelle Obama is releasing a new memoir, Becoming, out this Tuesday. The memoir appears to cover a lot of ground: she talks about having a miscarriage, IVF treatments, college life, and her childhood. She also talks about life in the White House, including when now-President Donald Trump rallied the racist “birther” movement against her husband, then-President Barack Obama.
In fact, she delves into Trump territory directly. When she realized Trump would likely win the presidency, she wrote that she wanted to “to block it all out and go to sleep,” as many of us can surely relate.
In reference to Trump’s inauguration, she wrote:
“The vibrant diversity of the two previous inaugurations was gone ... Someone from Barack's administration might have said that the optics there were bad — that what the public saw didn’t reflect the president’s reality or ideals.”
And like so many of us, she admits that even she couldn’t force a smile.
"But in this case, maybe it did,” she wrote. “Realizing it, I made my own optic adjustment: I stopped even trying to smile."
Obama has given exclusive reads of the memoir to NPR, and has started giving interviews, including with ABC below, about themes discussed in her book:
Oprah Winfrey has also selected it for her famous Book Club. Notably, the former first lady’s memoir is the only political book Winfrey has selected since she began the program in 1996.
Winfrey will even appear with Obama at the Chicago United Center on Tuesday night, which is the start of Obama’s promotional tour for the book. Obama has already taped an interview with Winfrey, that airs this Thursday on the OWN network. Excerpts of the memoir will also run in the Oprah Magazine, O.
The book is getting a lot of attention, and it’s not hard to understand why. The Obamas have a lot of fans to begin with, and from released excerpts, it seems the former first lady isn’t shying away from the hard, revealing topics.
"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," Obama wrote. Since so many of us are still wondering the same exact thing, people are certainly curious to see what conclusions Obama herself arrived at.