91 pages • 3 hours read
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
“Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that’s the end.”
Michelle points out the strangeness in the idea that we only get to be one thing as an adult, and that we are defined by a singular occupation. In doing so, she emphasizes the importance of the title of the memoir, Becoming, or the idea that we are constantly in the process of learning and adapting into a new version of ourselves. People shouldn’t stop achieving just because they have reached one pinnacle, and Michelle suggests that she will continue to grow and change as she becomes whatever follows being the First Lady.
“Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”
Michelle explains how her parents instructed her to be tolerant of others and not jump to conclusions about people. As a child, Michelle believes that her great-aunt and uncle are grouchy and too strict, but later in life she learns that both dealt with oppression. Understanding this allows Michelle to comprehend why Robbie held herself and others to such a high standard, and why Terry keeps things neat and overdresses. While it is easy to make snap judgments about people, this experience teaches Michelle that there is often much more to the story.
“Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Their anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. They aren’t ‘bad kids.’ They’re just trying to survive bad circumstances.”
In second grade, Michelle is placed into a class where the teacher does little to control or teach the students, and the class quickly becomes chaotic and unruly. Marian arranges for Michelle’s transfer to the third grade so she won’t miss out on learning, and this experience helps an adult Michelle understand that students are often labeled too quickly as “bad.” Most children simply need to know that they are important and valued, and that someone cares about their learning.
“These were highly intelligent, able-bodied men who were denied access to stable high-paying jobs, which in turn kept them from being able to buy homes, send their kids to college, or save for retirement. It pained them, I know, to be cast aside, to be stuck in jobs that they were overqualified for, to watch white people leapfrog past them at work, sometimes training new employees they knew might one day become their bosses. And it bred within each of them at least a basic level of resentment and mistrust: You never quite knew what other folks saw you to be.”
Michelle describes the Great Migration, a generation of black men who left the South to go to cities in the North for better opportunities. Though Michelle focuses on her grandfather Dandy’s story, she describes this movement to explain the oppression working against black people. Michelle shows the varying layers that work against communities of black Americans, putting them at an unfair disadvantage in schools and in the workplace.
“I realize I don’t know exactly what my mom did during the hours we were at school, mainly because in the self-centered manner of any child I never asked. I don’t know what she thought about, how she felt about being a traditional homemaker as opposed to working a different job. I only knew that when I showed up at home, there’d be food in the fridge, not just for me, but for my friends. I knew that when my class was going on an excursion, my mother would almost always volunteer to chaperone, arriving in a nice dress and dark lipstick to ride the bus with us to the community college or the zoo.”
As an adult, Michelle reflects on her relationship with her mother as a child. Though children rely on their mothers and might spend quite a bit of time with them, Michelle realizes now that she didn’t really know her mother as a person during this time of her life. Like many children, Michelle took for granted all the things her mother did for her, not realizing until she became an adult and a mother just how much these things meant.
“I’ve been lucky enough now in my life to meet all sorts of extraordinary and accomplished people—world leaders, inventors, musicians, astronauts, athletes, professors, entrepreneurs, artists and writers, pioneering doctors and researchers. Some (though not enough) are women. Some (though not enough) are black or of color. Some were born poor or have lived lives that to many of us would appear to have been unfairly heaped with adversity, and yet still they seem to operate as if they’d had every advantage in the world. What I’ve learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collections of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.”
After Michelle encounters a setback when a high school counselor suggests she won’t get into Princeton, Michelle decides to bet on herself and apply anyway. Many years later, Michelle reflects that some of the most successful people she’s met in her life have struggled, and all were second-guessed and criticized by people. We can choose to believe the people who tell us what we can and cannot do, but Michelle believes that a better path is to keep pushing onward and not give up.
“It takes energy to be the only black person in a lecture hall or one of a few nonwhite people trying out for a play or joining an intermural team. It requires effort, an extra level of confidence, to speak in those settings and own your presence in the room.”
Michelle describes her experience at Princeton, a mostly white university with a small minority student body. Michelle explains her perspective of the difficulties of existing as a black person in a setting that caters to white people. While these comments address Princeton specifically, this feeling of being Othered can exist anywhere in the world.
“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly.”
Michelle reflects on the dangers of living too much for other people and not for oneself. Michelle lived most of her young life seeking the approval of others. As a child, she receives positive responses when she says she wants to be a pediatrician, and as a young adult she pursues law school because it sounds impressive. However, Michelle realizes that this desire to impress people might have limited her opportunities to explore other possibilities. In trying to please others, she thought too little about pleasing herself.
“At this point, I thought of myself basically as trilingual. I knew the relaxed patois of the South Side and the high-minded diction of the Ivy League, and now on top of that I spoke Lawyer, too.”
Michelle describes the three different languages she speaks, referencing her childhood community in Chicago, her experience at Princeton, and now her time as a lawyer. Though tongue-in-cheek, this moment shows how much Michelle has been shaped by three different settings. In all three places, Michelle is speaking English, but every community has its own diction, turns of phrase, and rules for how one speaks and behaves. To thrive in three diverse settings shows Michelle’s intelligence, resourcefulness, and ability to adapt as needed.
“His voice climbed in intensity as he got to the end of his pitch. He wasn’t a preacher, but he was definitely preaching something—a vision. He was making a bid for our investment. The choice, as he saw it, was this: You give up or you work for change. ‘What’s better for us?’ Barack called to the people gathered in the room. ‘Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?’”
Michelle recalls a community organization event that she attended with Barack where she watched him persuade a group in the South Side to fight for their community. Barack’s first presidential campaign in 2008 revolved around Change, and Michelle shows the roots of that idea here. Michelle includes this incident to show that Barack’s ideals and hope for the future began long before his presidency.
“All this inborn confidence was admirable, of course, but honestly, try living with it. For me, coexisting with Barack’s strong sense of purpose—sleeping in the same bed with it, sitting at the breakfast table with it—was something to which I had to adjust, not because he flaunted it, exactly, but because it was so alive. In the presence of his certainty, his notion that he could make some sort of difference in the world, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit lost by comparison. His sense of purpose seemed like an unwitting challenge to my own.”
At the beginning of her relationship with Barack, Michelle struggles with realizing she does not have as strong a sense of purpose as he does. Michelle has always made her choices in life for practical reasons, but Barack’s passion for social change makes her question the path she chose for herself. Being inspired to make a difference in the world is a good thing, but Michelle acknowledges that it can be difficult to coexist with someone with high ideals, giving a glimpse into the more human aspects of her relationship with the future president.
“I moved with the awkwardness of a tourist, aware that we were outsiders, even with our black skin. People sometimes stared at us on the street. I hadn’t been expecting to fit right in, obviously, but I think I arrived there naively believing I’d feel some visceral connection to the continent I’d grown up thinking of as a sort of mythic motherland, as if going there would bestow on me some feeling of completeness. But Africa, of course, owed us nothing. It’s a curious thing to realize, the in-betweenness one feels being African American in Africa. It gave me a hard-to-explain feeling of sadness, a sense of being unrooted in both lands.”
After getting engaged to Barack, Michelle travels with him to Kenya to visit with some of his family members. Though Michelle enjoys her time in Kenya and embraces the cultural contrasts with what she knows back in Chicago, Michelle feels out of place. As an African American, Michelle has sometimes felt Othered in America because of her ancestry, cultural differences, and the color of her skin. Like many other African Americans, Michelle has been instilled with a sense of nostalgia for Africa, a place where she should ostensibly “belong.” Yet in visiting Africa, Michelle realizes she is also different from the people who have been born and raised there. As such, she feels as if she is not quite African or American, not wholly at home in either place.
“You and I, you and I, you and I. We were learning to adapt, to knit ourselves into a solid and forever form of us. Even if we were the same two people we’d always been, the same couple we’d been for years, we now had new labels, a second set of identities to wrangle. He was my husband. I was his wife. We’d stood up at church and said it out loud, to each other and to the world. It did feel as if we owed each other new things.”
Michelle details some of the early struggles in her marriage to Barack as they navigate learning to work as a united team. Michelle dispels some of the myth around her and Barack’s “ideal union” by showing that, like any couple, the relationship has its ups and downs. Michelle indicates the importance of learning together as a couple, putting aside individual wants, needs, and egos to learn how to cooperate and evolve together in their new roles as husband and wife.
“If I were to start a file on things nobody tells you about until you’re right in the thick of them, I might begin with miscarriages. A miscarriage is lonely, painful, and demoralizing almost on a cellular level. When you have one, you will likely mistake it for a personal failure, which it is not. Or a tragedy, which, regardless of how utterly devastating it feels in the moment, it also is not. What nobody tells you is that miscarriages happen all the time, to more women than you’d ever guess, given the relative silence around it. I learned this only after I mentioned that I’d miscarried to a couple of friends, who responded by heaping me with love and support and also their own miscarriage stories. It didn’t take away the pain, but in unburying their own struggles, they steadied me during mine, helping me see that what I’d been through was no more than a normal biological hiccup, a fertilized egg that, for what was probably a very good reason, had needed to bail out.”
Michelle details her journey to conceiving Malia and doesn’t shy away from her struggles. In giving a detailed description of her miscarriage, fertilization treatments, and other difficulties, Michelle tries to erase some of the stigma that surrounds infertility and miscarriage. Michelle suggests that speaking about this can help people find the support they need and realize that others have also undergone similar issues. Instead of trying to keep these matters secret, as if they reflect some sort of personal defect, Michelle advocates for openness and discussion.
“On my way, I was learning, was the product of Barack’s eternal optimism, an indication of his eagerness to be home that did nothing to signify when he would actually arrive. Almost home was not a geo-locator but rather a state of mind. Sometimes he was on his way but needed to stop in to have one last forty-five-minute conversation with a colleague before he got into the car. Other times, he was almost home but forgot to mention that he was first going to fit in a quick workout at the gym.”
Michelle quickly learns that Barack’s political ambitions will often compete with his ability to be with his family. Barack loves Michelle and the girls and genuinely wants to be home with them, but he feels pulled by another world that demands much of his time and attention. Michelle is frank about the strain this puts on the family, choosing to show the good and the bad of Barack’s political career. She allows people to see that although their marriage is strong, it isn’t a fairytale, and though Barack is a good man, he is not perfect.
“We’d lived with other people’s expectations so long that they were almost embedded in every conversation we had. Barack’s potential sat with our family at the dinner table. Barack’s potential rode along to school with the girls and to work with me. It was there even when we didn’t want it to be, adding a strange energy to everything. From my point of view, my husband was doing plenty already.”
Michelle reflects on the hardships of sharing Barack with the world. After Barack’s speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, people begin clamoring for him to make a presidential bid in the 2008 election. Michelle appreciates Barack’s ambition, talent, and drive, but she resents the way it can overshadow family life. The country begins to view Barack as if he belongs to them already, but Michelle wants to hold on to him and keep him for their family.
“I’d never been one who’d choose to spend a Saturday at a political rally. The appeal of standing in an open gym or high school auditorium to hear lofty promises and platitudes never made much sense to me. Why, I wondered, were all these people here? Why would they layer on extra socks and stand for hours in the cold? I could imagine people bundling up and waiting to hear a band whose every lyric they could sing or enduring a snowy Super Bowl for a team they’d followed since childhood. But politics? This was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before.
It began dawning on me that we were the band. We were the team about to take the field. What I felt more than anything was a sudden sense of responsibility. We owed something to each one of these people. We were asking for an investment of their faith, and now we had to deliver on what they’d brought us, carrying that enthusiasm through twenty months and fifty states and right into the White House. I hadn’t believed it was possible, but maybe now I did. This was the call-and-response of democracy, I realized, a contract forged person by person. You show up for us, and we’ll show up for you.”
Michelle initially expresses skepticism at the likelihood of Barack winning the election, but she has a change of heart when Barack announces his candidacy in Springfield and over 15,000 people come to support him. Barack’s team has been reassuring the Obamas how popular Barack is in the polls, but it isn’t until Michelle realizes the sacrifices that people are willing to make to show their support that she understands what they’re undertaking. Michelle feels the responsibility of carrying so many peoples’ hopes and dreams, and though she feels the pressure of these expectations, she wants to contribute to the dream that Barack is building.
“In general, I felt as if I couldn’t win, that no amount of faith or hard work would push me past my detractors and their attempts to invalidate me. I was female, I was black, and strong, which to certain people, maintaining a certain mindset, translated only to ‘angry.’ It was another damaging cliché, one that’s been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, and unconscious signal not to listen to what we’ve got to say.
I was now starting to actually feel a bit angry, which then made me feel worse, as if I were fulfilling some prophecy laid out for me by the haters, as if I’d given in. It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many ‘angry black women’ have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?”
Michelle speaks about the negative stereotypes she encounters during the 2008 presidential campaign. In particular, the stereotype about the “angry black woman” infuriates Michelle because it paints her into a corner from which she can’t escape. Michelle reflects that others have often undergone similar treatment, and that these stereotypes silence people and invalidate their feelings, frustrations, and concerns. However, as the eventual First Lady of the United States, Michelle can tell her side of the story to an audience of people who will listen.
“My husband’s career had allowed me to witness the machinations of politics and power up close. I’d seen how just a handful of votes in every precinct could mean the difference not just between one candidate and another but between one value system and the next. If a few people stayed home in each neighborhood, it could determine what our kids learned in schools, which health-care options we had available, or whether or not we sent our troops to war. Voting was both simple and incredibly effective.”
On the day Michelle goes to cast her vote for Barack as President of the United States, she reflects on the power of voting. Both Michelle and Barack have been involved in voting initiatives to help empower their local communities, and Barack’s political career has given Michelle insight into just how important it is for people to exercise their right to vote. With little effort, people can impact decisions that can change their local communities and the national government.
“Confidence, I’d learned then, sometimes needs to be called from within. I’ve repeated the same words to myself many times now, through many climbs.”
Facing the overwhelming task of not only acting as the First Lady of the United States, but the first black First Lady, Michelle feels old worries surfacing about not being enough. Michelle recalls the lessons learned from her high school and college days of looking to herself for validation instead of waiting for it to come from others. Though Michelle will be thrust into the public eye and scrutinized, she resolves to tune out the noise and rely on her own self-reflection to guide her.
“From where I sat, I could see more of the chamber below. It was an unusual, bird’s-eye view of our country’s leaders, an ocean of whiteness and maleness, dressed in dark suits. The absence of diversity was glaring—honestly, it was embarrassing—for a modern, multicultural country. It was most dramatic among the Republicans. At the time, there were just seven nonwhite Republicans in Congress—none of them African American and only one was a woman. Overall, four out of five members of Congress were male.”
On the day that Barack addresses joint sessions of Congress, Michelle sits in and observes some of the hostility Barack will face during his tenure as President. Michelle notes a lack of diversity in Congress, marked by few people of color and women. Barack’s struggle to unite Republicans and Democrats and pass initiatives will be amplified, Michelle realizes, not just because of a party divide, but because Congress reflects an old white ideal, representing only the needs of one specific demographic and resisting change.
“I felt sometimes like a swan on a lake, knowing that my job was in part to glide and appear serene, while underwater I never stopped pedaling my legs.”
Michelle struggles with her role as First Lady, knowing that the public will have many expectations of her, some of which are nearly impossible to fulfill. Though Michelle is expected to behave in certain ways and accomplish certain things, she can never let any strain or struggle show. Being a public figure means constantly feeling the weight of peoples’ judgment, and constantly striving to live up to their demanding expectations.
“Fences needed to go up; boundaries required protecting. Bin Laden was not invited to dinner, nor was the humanitarian crises in Libya, nor were the Tea Party Republicans. We had kids, and kids need room to speak and grow. Our family time was when big worries and urgent concerns got abruptly and mercilessly shrunk to nothing so that the small could rightly take over. Barack and I would sit at dinner, hearing tales from the Sidwell playground or listening to the details of Malia’s research project on endangered animals, feeling as if they were the most important things in the world. Because they were. They deserved to be.”
Though Michelle, and especially Barack, deal on a daily basis with issues and concerns that affect the entire world, they set aside quality time with their daughters. Michelle stresses the importance of having balance in life, even when the stakes are high. To Michelle and Barack, giving time to their daughters and connecting with them trumps any other concern.
“I thought often of what I owed and to whom. I carried a history with me, and it wasn’t that of presidents or First Ladies. I’d never related to the story of John Quincy Adams the way I did to that of Sojourner Truth, or been moved by Woodrow Wilson the way I was by Harriet Tubman. The struggles of Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King were more familiar to me than those of Eleanor Roosevelt or Mamie Eisenhower. I carried their histories, along with those of my mother and grandmothers. None of these women could ever have imagined a life like the one I now had, but they’d trusted that their perseverance would yield something better, eventually, for someone like me. I wanted to show up in the world in a way that honored who they were.”
As Barack’s reelection campaign nears, Michelle reflects on what her family has accomplished in the White House thus far, as well as what she continues to hope to do in the future. Because of her position as the first black First Lady, Michelle feels a heightened responsibility to represent her ancestors and other women like her who have never had the chance to take on such a public role. Michelle knows that she represents herself and these other women, and she takes that responsibility seriously.
“It was dignity I wanted to make an appeal for—the idea that as a nation we might hold on to the core thing that had sustained my family, going back generations. Dignity had always gotten us through. It was a choice, and not always the easy one, but the people I respected most in life made it again and again, every single day. There was a motto Barack and I tried to live by, and I offered it that night from the stage: When they go low, we go high.”
In the face of Donald Trump’s campaign for President of the United States, Michelle calls for a return to dignity. Though Michelle has watched firsthand as Barack faces opposition from the Republican Congress, Michelle has also had meaningful personal interactions with Republican politicians, such as the warm welcome given by the Bush family to the White House. Watching the way that Trump bullies his opponents and belittles people he deems to be beneath him, Michelle resolves to speak out against his tactics and remind America of a better way to conduct themselves. She suggests that we cannot control the way that others treat us, but we can preserve our own dignity in the way we treat others.
Plus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
By Michelle Obama
Books on U.S. History
View Collection
Goodreads Reading Challenge
View Collection
Inspiring Biographies
View Collection
Memoir
View Collection
Oprah's Book Club Picks
View Collection
Politics & Government
View Collection
Popular Book Club Picks
View Collection
Women's Studies
View Collection