Both Michelle and Barack Obama have written best-selling books, so I guess now we can call them a “power couple.”
I recently finished reading A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s memoir of the first part of his presidency. And just a couple of months ago, I read Becoming, Michelle Obama’s telling of their family’s life up to and including the White House years. Together, they total more than 1,100 pages of reading. And every single one of those pages was worth it. (I wrote a bit about her book here.) Here are some thoughts:
Even though both books cover the same subject matter, they are markedly different. For one thing, Barack had a couple of previous books—Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope—in which he wrote about his early life, so he didn’t need to revisit that here. This was Michele’s first memoir, so she had to catch us up on her life growing up in Chicago, going to law school, and then working through a succession of high-level jobs before moving to Washington when her husband was elected president. In her book, they got married on page 163; in his, the wedding took place on page 23. From there, though, he caught up a little bit; they moved into the White House on page 230 of his book, page 299 of hers.
By then, the books had diverged in other ways. Her book deals much more with the pressures of trying to maintain as “normal” a family life as possible while living such an abnormal situation as the White House. Their daughters were a paramount concern, and it fell to Michelle to be the one worrying about raising them to as “normal” a life as possible for kids. Michelle turned out to be one of the more activist first ladies, with long-running initiatives to improve childhood nutrition and support the families of veterans. She was always the reluctant partner when it came to politics, but she found her causes and worked for them, all the while fiercely maintaining her focus, mainly, on being a mom.
Barack’s book, on the other hand, is policy-heavy. Every major issue gets the multi-page treatment, with background, prevailing opinions in Congress and within the administration, and the process by which decisions were reached. A Promised Land clocks in at 701 pages, and it only takes us up to May 2011. There’s the promise of a second edition that will cover the remainder of Obama’s presidency, but at this rate, it might take him three books to cover it all.
It feels somewhat sexist to compare the books this way—like his version is The Economist and hers is The Ladies’ Home Journal—but that’s just the way it played out here. I know many people who would love to write the sequel to this story so that she eventually runs for and becomes president herself. And she’d be a great president. But that’s just not going to happen. Trust me on that one.
One thing I didn’t see in the two books was disagreement between their two versions of events. I honestly wasn’t looking for points where his account differed from hers—and I read the books several months apart—but they seemed pretty consistent to me.
In reading A Promised Land, one can’t help but be struck by the contrast between Obama’s presidency and what came after. He spends multiple pages on each issue, describing the lengthy, process-driven debate on how policy decisions were made. By comparison, after Trump became president, it seemed like policy decisions were made on the briefest of whims and announced on Twitter before anyone else in the administration even knew about them.
Barack Obama also warns several times about how periods of economic anxiety, like that caused by the 2008 financial crisis, can lead to periods of dangerous authoritarianism and radical nationalism. He was spot on, there, not just in the United States but across Europe.
Anyway, I highly recommend both books, and I’m looking forward to the next volume from Barack. Considering the time he obviously put into A Promised Land, though, I expect it’ll be a couple of years.
