In her wonderful autobiography, Becoming, Michelle Obama tells a story about the time her family visited some African American friends who had moved to a predominantly white area in the suburbs. At the end of the visit, Obama’s father discovered that “someone had scratched a line across the side of his beloved Buick, a thin ugly gulch that ran across the door and towards the tail of the car. It had been done with a key or a rock and was in no way accidental.”
How did her father react to this almost certainly racist act? He just “carried on”, as he always did – because he was a “withstander”, someone who could take whatever life threw at him and find a way to keep going.
The Light We Carry, the former first lady’s second book, is intended to be a practical guide to help us all be a bit more like her father (and like Obama herself) and learn to cope with adversity, be it prejudice, a pandemic or the chilling thought of Donald Trump re-entering the White House. In Obama’s words, the aim is to give readers a “glimpse inside my personal toolkit” – the strategies she uses to be “more comfortable, less paralysed, inside of uncertainty”.
The book contains 10 of these techniques, ranging from “starting kind” (it’s best to ignore the first negative thought that comes into our heads in the morning and instead we should be “inviting” a “better and more tender one”) through to “the whole of us” (life is better when “we grip hands with another soul”). Miraculously, these self-help bromides don’t come across as cloying, mainly because Obama is so disarmingly honest about her fears, failures and all-too human flaws.
