Book 54 - Becoming Bored

Title: Becoming

Author: Michelle Obama

Genre: memoir

I love everything about the beginning of this book. Michelle (I'll call her Michelle because she inspires a first-name-basis kind of familiarity) uses the first part of the novel to examine her own trajectory from a lower-middle class black girl in Detroit to a successful lawyer, with a specific focus on education and race. How her parents treated her and her brother, letting them solve their own problems and build their own opinions about their world. How being moved into a better class in her early school life gave her that perpetual step up over those who didn't have a parent to fight for the best teacher, the best opportunities. She also talks about the adult men in her life, and how the inability to achieve unionized jobs because they're black completely altered the trajectory of their own lives, leading to less stables jobs, no pensions, and a lot of mistrust.

This is one of the strongest accomplishments of the book - illustrating the line from a to b in a clear, concise, and accessible way. I say accessible because somehow she manages to be inclusive in the messages she delivers. It isn't "stupid white people fucked up the lives of so many", it's "yes, horrible things have happened in the past, but together we can look to the future and be better". I don't know if it's a politician thing, but in any case this inclusivity is so disarming that all I wanted was to hear her stories and be better.

Then Barack comes into the picture, and wah wah wahhh, things go a little stale. The aforementioned accessibility of Michelle's story soured a bit on me, as it begins to feel all very carefully composed and mind-numbingly PC. I could feel Michelle getting lost in Barack's story - which is basically what she spends the latter half of the novel trying not to do!

Rating: 🐶🐶🐶 /5