One of the refrains of Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming (2018) – which charts the former first lady’s journey from her working-class origins on the South Side of Chicago to the White House, by way of Princeton, Harvard, a high-end corporate law firm (where she met Barack), and a series of executive jobs in the non-profit sector – are “four words that reliably plague even the most accomplished and powerful people I know”: Am I good enough?
While her husband is portrayed as a bookish dreamer full of languid self-confidence, Obama (née Robinson) presents herself as driven, industrious and fastidious: a “control freak”, “a detail person”, a “box checker” whose idea of a group holiday (she is “rigorous about friendship”) is a “boot camp” featuring multiple daily workouts, and no dessert or booze. At Princeton, Obama writes in Becoming, “Beneath my laid-back college-kid demeanour, I lived like a half-closeted CEO, quietly but unswervingly focused on achievement… Such is the life of a girl who can’t stop wondering, Am I good enough? and is still trying to show herself the answer.”
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