NONFICTION
“Michelle Obama: A Life”
by Peter Slevin
Knopf, 432 pages, $27.95
A new biography of Michelle Obama paints a picture of a presidential spouse whose first-of-a-kind tenure unfolded in a hyperpartisan age and how one false step “risked death by a thousand tweets.”
“She was not easily characterized and yet public reaction was often binary,” Northwestern University journalism professor Peter Slevin writes in “Michelle Obama: A Life.” “Adore. Abhor. Respect. Reject. Warm, wise and embracing. Haughty, petty and disdainful.”
Slevin, a former reporter for The Washington Post, goes to great lengths to depict the first lady’s 1960s and 1970s upbringing in a racially divided Chicago, often hostile to African-Americans.
It’s plain the first lady did not cooperate with Slevin’s book, which often relies on the president’s books, and her brother’s memoir, to bring her story to life.
What was Michelle Robinson, called “Miche” by her father, like as a child?
Hard-headed and needing a spanking “from time to time,” but, like her older brother, Craig, a “good kid,” her paternal grandmother once told a co-worker, the book says.
What were the youthful passions of the future Ivy Leaguer who grew up in a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with no air-conditioning at 7436 S. Euclid Ave.?
They were average-kid favorites such as Malibu Barbie, an Easy-Bake oven and television’s “The Brady Bunch,” though by the time she was a teen she was regaling people by playing Broadway show tunes, jazz and pop songs on the piano.
Such glimpses into the first lady’s early life are found throughout this meticulously researched biography by Slevin, an associate professor at the Medill School of Journalism who as a reporter wrote about her beginning in 2007 leading up to the Iowa presidential caucuses.
The narrative to Michelle-watchers is familiar: A lawyer at Sidley & Austin who, against her initial instincts, falls hard for the summer hire she was asked to mentor; the reluctant political spouse struggles to keep up the demands of motherhood and career while her husband becomes a political phenomenon; and an unlikely first lady blazes a trail for herself as both a traditionalist and iconoclast in the East Wing.
Slevin pulls back the curtain of her White House life, saying she often “felt swamped and was not shy about confessing her unhappiness” in the early days.
She is, he says, prone to overprepare for events and has the highest standards for her staff and the president’s. In the White House, Slevin writes, she “was an early riser and her predawn emails to her aides, if she felt they had fallen short, could be blistering.”
Though the perks of being first lady, and the platform one has, may be envied, the slings and arrows that come with the job, as Slevin describes them, make it little wonder a woman he casts as an “inveterate list maker” has a short one in mind for her post-White House life.
He writes that she has said she looked forward to staying fit, traveling to beautiful places and one day, being a grandmother.
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