One afternoon not long after the Obamas had moved into the White House, Michelle organised a playdate for her youngest daughter, Sasha. The children were at their new school and she was worried about how they were settling in. So, in a move recognisable to parents everywhere, she hovered unseen nearby, listening intently, “quietly overcome with emotion any time a new peal of laughter erupted from Sasha’s room”.
When it was over she did, again, what any parent of a small child might do, and went out to meet the new friend’s mother. She wanted to chat about how the playdate had gone and maybe make a new friend for herself – at which point all relatability abruptly ended: a rustling surrounded her as her Secret Service detail, who hadn’t planned for this, talked urgently into their wrist microphones. The mother’s car was swiftly encircled by a Counter Assault Team. Hey there, Obama said. The woman, “eyeballing the guards clad in helmets and black battle dress … very, very slowly opened the car door and got out”.
It’s a funny anecdote. But like every story in The Light We Carry, and in Obama’s previous book, her memoir Becoming, it is told in the service of a serious point, which in this case is that making sustaining friendships requires effort and intention. This book grew out of the great personal response to Becoming – the small gatherings that followed stadium events, the women who wrote directly to her for advice: “Hey mrs michelle, i’m having a lot of boy problems …”, who recognised their own lives in that of their former first lady. They will find more to recognise here, where the mundane is given equal billing with the entirely exceptional in what amounts to a carefully worked out manifesto for surviving, and hopefully thriving, in the world.
It is a polished performance, tightly structured, direct, conversational, in the folksy but laser-sharp public style both Obamas made their own, a tone that would work across a kitchen table or from a pulpit or even in those vast stadiums; sometimes deceptively simple, and not always original, but well earned. That point about friendships, for instance. Behind it are the years she spent working full-time, in sole charge of two small children, when Barack was campaigning in Washington and serially failing to turn up for dinner when he was supposed to: the female friends she made were a lifeline then, and continue to be.
Where Becoming – which has so far sold more than 17m copies across all formats – is the story of her life, The Light We Carry, subtitled “Overcoming in Uncertain Times”, comprises the lessons of that life. Each chapter takes a theme that in other hands would become an entire money-spinning book: the importance of flow (though she doesn’t call it that); of sidestepping one’s inner critic (“She is every monster I’ve ever known. And she is also me”); of managing fear and of showing up. She explores the importance of faith – understood more as taking one deliberate step at a time and trusting in the future, rather than as religious faith; of friendship and of partnership. There is a chapter on parenting, which she largely turns over to her own mother’s lessons, and is worth the price of admission alone. Occasionally she is so intent on finding the good, or going high – in a chapter on secrets and shame, for instance, where she argues that telling others can be a salve for those who feel alone with their differences – that she doesn’t mention how some shame-inducing experiences can be debilitating, life-limiting traumas, which seems a bit obtuse. In Becoming this manifested as the most painful moments being described sparingly, understatedly – it “hurt a little bit” – before quickly moving on.
There is less of that here. The Light We Carry is clearer than ever about just how much her focus, her hyper-preparedness and her knowledge that everything is vulnerable were shaped by her father’s progressive multiple sclerosis: “The sound of a full-grown man hitting the floor is thunderous – a thing you never forget.” Then there is the understanding of how close failure and stunting are if you are born dark-skinned in the US; how quick the system is to write you off, how agile and driven you must be to dodge its automatic cancellations. And she makes no secret of how hurt she felt by the dismissal that followed her even into the White House: the caricature of her as an angry Black woman, and the way anything she said to mitigate it was used to prove the prejudice all over again.
She describes a period of “low-grade” depression during the pandemic, when her previously near-impregnable armour of busyness disappeared, and is far clearer in this book about the difficulties inherent in her own specific type of alone-ness, the exhausting vigilance, as the first African American first lady, against being seen as somehow insolent for choosing not to hew to tradition. “The work of visibility is difficult,” she writes, “and it’s distributed unevenly … I happen to be well acquainted with the burdens of representation and the double standards for excellence that steepen the hills so many of us are trying to climb. It remains a damning fact of life that we ask too much of those who are marginalised and too little of those who are not.”
In the final part of the book, she turns outward to address a clear “you”. There is the sudden sense of a specific audience, all those who are “different” (and not just as defined by race), whom she’d like to buttress and warn. “When the climb finally ends and you arrive, exhausted and sweating, to that high place with a pretty view that you’ve long dreamed about, there’s one thing you’re almost always guaranteed to encounter, and that’s an air-conditioned luxury tour bus and a group of people who did none of the work, having been driven straight up an access road, their picnic blankets already laid out, their party well under way.” To add insult to injury, they may then intimate that you are the one who took the short cut – “affirmative action, or scholarship kid, or gender quota, or diversity hire” – and thus don’t deserve to be there. To go high, in the phrase that will now always be connected with her, is an ongoing battle to evade these sinkholes; a daily, grinding, moment-by-moment decision to choose empathy, and openness, to ask “How do we build places where gladness lives?”, and then set out to do it.
• The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times is published by Viking (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
