Becoming

Description:

Theme:

The main themes in Michelle Obama’s Becoming are dedication to personal growth and aspirations and persistence despite setbacks.

Summary:

It described by the author as a deeply personal experience, born to loving parents in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, she grew into a strong, independent woman, who just happened to meet and fall in love with a man named Barack Obama.

This book talks about her roots and how she found her voice, as well as her time in the White House, her public health campaign, and her role as a mother.

It is published by Crown and was released in 24 languages.

Famous Quotes:

“Failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear.”

“Friendships between women, as any woman will tell you, are built of a thousand small kindnesses… swapped back and forth and over again.”

“As a kid, you learn to measure long before you understand the size or value of anything. Eventually, if you’re lucky, you learn that you’ve been measuring all wrong.”

“I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.”

“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.”

“You don’t really know how attached you are until you move away, until you’ve experienced what it means to be dislodged, a cork floating on the ocean of another place.”

“Even in him, even in your great teacher, I prefer the thing to the words, his actions and his life are more important than his speech, the gestures of his hand more important than his opinions.”

“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”

“It’s all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there’s more growing to be done.”

Beautiful Lines:

“Grief and resilience live together.”

“Bullies were scared people hiding inside scary people.”

“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.”

“The lesson being that in life you control what you can.”

“No one, I realized, was going to look out for me unless I pushed for it.”

“Time, as far as my father was concerned, was a gift you gave to other people.”

“Dominance, even the threat of it, is a form of dehumanization. It’s the ugliest kind of power.”

“We were planting seeds of change, the fruit of which we might never see. We had to be patient.”

“The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.”

“If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.”

“Do we settle for the world as it is, or do we work for the world as it should be?”

“For every door that’s been opened to me, I’ve tried to open my door to others.”

“The more popular you became, the more haters you acquired.”

“Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down.”

“Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”

“In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.”

“His money went largely toward books, which to him were like sacred objects, providing ballast for his mind.”

Literary awards:

- Audie Award for Autobiography/Memoir (2020)
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize Nominee for Current Interest (2018)
- Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Memoir & Autobiography (2018)
- NAACP Image Award for Biography/Autobiography (2019)

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