Michelle Obama's "Becoming," part one

Knowing very little about the former first lady, I was intrigued to hear her memoir recommended as one of the best books of the year for the quality of its writing, "especially in the earlier part" before it gets into politics and the White House years. So far, at the 16% mark, she's Michelle Robinson, reared on Euclid Avenue in Chicago, now a student at Princeton, and I'm enjoying every page.

The quality of the writing means her ability to conjure people with thumbnail sketches. We get to know relatives named Southside and Dandy. Her gregarious older brother Craig, who, "in his ambling and smiley way, had conveniently broken every trail for me [and] created sunshine that I could just step into" (56), goes to Princeton, "leaving a six - foot -six, two - hundred pound gap in our daily lives" (58). There's the music teacher downstairs whose piano is such a wreck of chipped keys and missing notes, that young Michelle in her recital at a concert hall can't find middle C among perfectly formed keys. Later, we meet Santita before we learn that her father is a black man preparing to run for President, Jesse Jackson; and Czerny, her boss at Princeton's "Third World Center" (a sort of Black Student Union), "a swift - moving and lively New Yorker who wore flared jeans and wedge sandals and seemed always to be having four or five ideas at once" (76).

Most, we pick up Michelle's admiration and gratitude for her independent stay - at - home mom and her father, a former boxer fighting multiple sclerosis.   In the self - absorbed way of teenagers, she never considered her parents' married life apart from what she saw. This cues her reflection on something she learned many years later, that her mother considered leaving her husband every spring. Why? Michelle has never asked, and tells us she doesn't need to. "I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it's a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately -- even alone" (51). Then, Michelle tries a thought experiment about what it was like to be her mother during the winter.

If you've never passed a winter in Chicago, let me describe it: You can live for a hundred straight days beneath an iron - gray sky that claps itself like a lid over the city. Frigid, biting winds blow in off the lake. Snow falls in dozens of ways, in heavy overnight dumps and day - time, sideways squalls, in demoralizing sloppy sleet and fairy-tale billows of fluff. There's ice, usually, lots of it, that shellacs the sidewalks and windshields that then need to be scraped. There's the sound of that scraping in the early mornings.... City snowplows thunder through the streets as the white snow gets piled up and sooty, until nothing is pristine.

She continues her thought experiment, imagining being a young mother when spring begins to change the landscape. The woman takes out windows to wipe the glass and scrub the sills. Looking out and breathing in fresh air change the woman's sense of her life.

Maybe you spend the whole day considering new ways to live before finally you fit every window back into its frame and empty your bucket of Pine - Sol into the sink. And maybe now all your certainty returns, because yes, truly, it's spring and once again you've made the choice to stay.

That's remarkable writing, turning vibrant description of a literal place and time into a metaphor, using that metaphor to explore the psychology of another person's thinking, all the while hinting at what the author has experienced in her own marriage.

While she keeps moving forward in time, she finds unobtrusive ways to fill us in on past and future. For example, when her brother suddenly decides to put the family through a fire drill that entails the father's lying helpless on the floor, Michelle cues in a few paragraphs about her father's lifelong attitude of service to others and his involvement with the community through Chicago Democratic politics. The anecdote about a college roommate's blithe unconcern for picking up and keeping things in order ends in a reflection that this was a good corrective to her own mania for order, and good preparation for marriage to a man who "felt no compunction, really ever, to fold his clothes" (80).

She also works insights into the work, expressed with elegant brevity. "You don't really know how attached you are until you move away," she writes, feeling like "a cork floating on the ocean of another place" (77). Run - ins with bad educators give her occasions to develop an idea across several chapters, how "failure is a feeling long before it's an actual result" (66). Coming to ninth grade at a magnet school, she heard a voice inside calling her, "not enough, not enough," self - doubt "like a malignant cell that threatened to divide and divide again, unless I could find some way to stop it" (56).

I've just read about her first couple years at Princeton. She explains what readers like me -- white, male -- might not understand without help. "At Princeton, I needed my black friends." The mostly - white, mostly affluent, mostly male population was a different world, where "you learn only slowly that your new peers had been given SAT tutoring or college - caliber teaching in high school or had gone to boarding school and thus weren't grappling with the difficulties of being away from home for the first time" (74). She uses that childhood piano recital for an analogy:

It was like stepping onstage at your first piano recital and realizing that you'd never played anything but an instrument with broken keys. Your world shifts, but you're asked to adjust and overcome, to play your music the same as everyone else. This is doable, of course -- minority and underprivileged students rise to the challenge all the time -- but it takes energy.

So that's why being among black friends was a relief.

That's as far as I've read. As I'm often taking breaks from two or three books at a time to try some new one, it may be awhile before I get back to this one. So far, so good!