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This Is Why We Love Michelle Obama
The real star of her new memoir is a small, crowded apartment on Euclid Avenue in the South Side of Chicago
Michelle Obama’s decade in the public eye has made her an icon every bit as much as it has her husband. Her beauty, style, down-to-earth sensibility, and grace in the face of a constant barrage of racist and sexist ridicule has made her loved by millions around the world. She has the cosmopolitan glamour of political wives before her like Jacqueline Kennedy or Princess Diana. But in her new memoir, Becoming, we learn that her public persona is inseparable from her modest beginnings on Euclid Avenue in the South Side of Chicago.
Chicago wasn’t just a launch pad for Michelle; it was, and still is, her nucleus. “Together, in our cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago, [my family] helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country,” she writes.
Michelle, her parents, and her brother, Craig, lived on the lower level of a two-level place that was initially meant for just one or two people. Michelle’s grandfather, a skilled carpenter, made a partition, turning one room into two and creating a kind of “mirror existence” for Michelle and her beloved older brother — one that started in childhood and culminated in both…
