Becoming: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Michelle’s feelings for Barack quickly surge, particularly because he is due back at Harvard in a month. She begins spending nights at Barack’s apartment. He is unlike anyone she’s dated before: openly affectionate, unafraid of showing fear or weakness, never talking about material things but instead putting most of his money towards books. She often asks what he’s thinking and he’ll say political topics like income inequality.

Michelle and Barack try to keep their relationship under wraps at work. Work feels like a distraction, however, from spending time with each other and learning more about each other. Barack is intrigued by Michelle’s upbringing, the sameness of life on Euclid Avenue. Michelle is interested in the fact that Barack is rather nontraditional, viewing marriage as an “unnecessary and overhyped convention.”

Barack’s family was very unlike Michelle’s. His mother, Ann Dunham, and his father, a Kenyan student named Barack Obama Sr., had met in college in Hawaii. Their marriage was brief: they divorced and Ann married a Javanese geologist and moved to Jakarta with six-year-old Barack.

Barack enjoyed his time in Indonesia, but Ann was concerned about his education, and so she sent Barack back to Oahu to attend private school and live with her parents and Barack’s half-sister Maya. His mother split her time between Oahu and Jakarta. Even though Barack had had far less stability than Michelle, his family life “had left him self-reliant and curiously hard-wired for optimism.”

One evening that summer, a community organizer colleague asks a favor of Barack: to lead a training at a black parish in Roseland, on the South Side. Michelle accompanies him. Barack introduces himself to the parish before asking people to share their stories and concerns about their neighborhood. He then tells them that even a tiny group of people inside a church could make change. They are skeptical, but he isn’t put off by this skepticism.

Barack tries to show the people how to think positively, amid their “disenfranchisement and sinking helplessness.” Michelle writes that she’d always been raised to think positively, in order to overcome her circumstances. But Barack’s version of hope, she notes, is different: “It was one thing to get yourself out of a stuck place, I realized. It was another thing entirely to try and get the place itself unstuck.” As Barack speaks more and more intensely and inspiringly, the people in the room nod in approval and yell “Amen!”

When the summer ends, Barack returns to Harvard. Both he and Michelle would be busy the following year: she would be trying to make partner at the law firm, and he was chosen as an editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review in addition to his studies. And despite their very intimate relationship, they would be 900 miles away from each other. Barack says he’s “not much of a phone guy,” but Michelle insists that they make time for each other to speak on the phone.

Michelle is part of the recruiting team, and she interviews students for summer associate jobs. She makes it a priority to bring in law students who are smart and driven but also “something other than male and white.” She insists that the firm cast a wider net to search for students, not only from Ivy League schools, but also from state schools and historically black colleges like Howard University.

That Christmas, Michelle and Barack go to Honolulu together, and Barack introduces her to some of his family and the places where he grew up. She meets Ann and Barack’s grandparents, finding them not unlike her own middle-class family. She understands that this explains some of the ease between them—that despite their dissimilar experiences growing up, they both had very supportive families.

Michelle notes that many of her friends judge potential partners “from the outside in,” focusing on looks and financial prospects and then looking to see if their personalities match. But Michelle sees immediately that Barack has long-lasting relationships with friends, isn’t self-conscious about fear or weakness, and is both humble and truthful. They talk, somewhat hypothetically, about places to live, children, and what their future might look like.

Michelle is still in touch with many friends from school. Suzanne, in particular, is still on a zig-zagging path, trying to optimize the fun in her life. Michelle views these choices (like turning down an Ivy League business school to go to a state program because it would be easier) as “an affront to [Michelle’s] way of doing things.” But, she realizes now, this is unfair judgement. Just before she starts school, Suzanne returns from a round-the-world adventure and discovers that she has cancer.

Suzanne’s cancer, an aggressive form of lymphoma, is the first thing that shakes Michelle’s view that a person can work their way out of any problem. In response, Michelle simply denies the gravity of the situation. By June, another of Michelle’s friends calls her and tells her that Suzanne has been hospitalized. Michelle flies to see Suzanne, though she is in a coma when Michelle arrives. Michelle regrets not coming earlier, and also regrets the many times she thought Suzanne was making the wrong move by focusing on fun rather than long-term goals. She watches as Suzanne’s breathing grows more and more ragged, until she passes away. Michelle is angry, baffled by the unfairness of someone getting sick and dying at twenty-six.