Becoming and Elsey Come Home

Wow what a difference a couple weeks make. Our temps seem to have soared from single digits to 60 degrees this month, and now we have ponds of snowmelt all over the place. Spring appears to have sprung for the moment, and Frosty the snow pile is headed out. Or is it? I’m sure winter will try to make a come back a few more times here, but it won’t last long now. We are in the homestretch. Say goodbye winter.

The start of spring can feel truly amazing … and yet there’s news of epic flooding in other parts of the world that look truly devastating — in the Midwest for one, and especially in Mozambique and Zimbabwe right now due to a cyclone. So my thoughts are scattered at the moment on everything from the basketball of March Madness to sheer catastrophe.

Which reminds me:  If you’re feeling stressed about something these days: work, bills, house, politics, the state of the world, then perhaps familiarize yourself with the Dammit Doll. Have you seen these? My sister gave me one years ago when I was following a losing football team. The Dolls are made to be whacked about against a sofa or wall so you can feel better and let your stress or anger go. The instructions say as you whack the stuffing out, it helps to yell: “Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!” I think the company that makes them is out of California, where someone apparently has a good sense of humor. I got a new one this past Christmas, pictured at left, of our current occupant in the White House. Let’s just say, it’s helped me out quite a bit these past months relieving stress … that is, when my dog isn’t trying to pull it apart. And now, I’ll leave you with a couple reviews of what I finished lately.     

I feel like I’m on the bandwagon with this one, liking Michelle Obama’s memoir “Becoming” very much. It came out in November and I’ve inundated myself with it the past couple of weeks, first listening to the audiobook of it read by the author, then reading the hardback copy, so I could note some of its passages. I know it quite well now. I liked both formats but would especially recommend the audio version as Michelle’s reading of it is pretty illuminating. Her varying inflections and slow thoughtful reading of it make her story come to life and give more resonance to what she wrote.

It’s not an overtly political book — nor merely PR fluff — about the Red and Blue states and whose policies are the best and what she accomplished under the administration, though there’s some of that at the end, instead it focuses more on her life story, her family, and how she was shaped by her upbringing and those close to her. There’s also some juicy parts about the presidential campaigns and her time in the White House that come to light. So what more do you want — the book is a behind-the-scenes look at history told in interesting detail from an accomplished African American woman, reflecting back on her experience. As she writes: “I’m an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey.” 

Indeed it was. From a working-class family on the South Side of Chicago (whose parents did not go to college) to attending Princeton and Harvard Law School, she was an overachiever, a box checker she says, who met her future husband while being a mentor to him as a summer associate at a Chicago law firm. Oh yeah. Barack comes off like a nerdy prodigy, not a happy hour kind of guy, but one from a far-off family with a different, mixed background. Her family, on the other hand, was Michelle’s home base, forever on the South Side’s Euclid Avenue, where she lived even during her working life after law school.  

Michelle and Barack were like yin to each other’s yang, so she writes. She liked order and routine, he gravitated toward mess and chaos. He felt a calling for politics, she felt the opposite. He was from Hawaii, she had never been West. Their lives were busy and loaded with work and projects. At one point, she says they sought marriage counseling. At another point she talks about them wanting children, but they had to go through IVF for the pregnancies of both daughters. You get a sense that their lives were quite a handful even before he became a state senator and eventually a U.S. senator, traveling to D.C. while Michelle stayed behind in Chicago. She was not a big fan of the political circus life, or of his life taking over her career. Yet ultimately she did not want to stand in his way. 

She writes about trying to balance being a wife and a mother, and working full time. And later, about getting onboard Barack’s run for the presidency and campaigning for him in Iowa and elsewhere. She elaborates on the perception she got of being an “angry black female” and a “radical” on the campaign, which is illuminating. She comes off being more of a pragmatist and a family person than any kind of radical. Both Michelle and Barack were also touched by tragedies: Michelle’s father, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, died when she was in her first job after law school, and her close college roommate, age 26, died around the same time. While Barack’s parents were both dead by the time he became a state senator. So they shared similar losses and adversities, yet were endeared to each other, their remaining families, and high-powered jobs.  

You’ll just have to read it, if you haven’t already: as Michelle’s view of Election Night in 2008 and her family’s subsequent years in the White House are definitely worth the price of admission. You’ll want to find out what living in the White House was like, with their daughters, and how things played out there. Michelle also talks about her health initiatives for kids, her work with Jill Biden to help military families, and the vegetable garden she started on the White House lawn. There’s not many swipes at political opponents, like the Bushes, or John McCain, though there are a few pointed ones at Trump: “I will always wonder,” she writes, “about what led so many women, in particular, to reject an exceptionally qualified candidate and instead choose a misogynist as their president.” Me too, Michelle, me too.

I guess in general the book made me like the Obamas a bit more. I had already been fans of them but now I felt I understood them and their humble backgrounds a bit better. Michelle’s grace, dignity, and intelligence shine through in this memoir, which seems a pretty candid look back. She’s not out to settle scores, but more in it to highlight her journey. Here’s one passage I found particularly on point:  

“The president-elect, I learned, is given access to $100,000 in federal funds to help with moving and redecorating, but Barack insisted that we pay for everything ourselves, using what we’d saved from his book royalties. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been this way: extra-vigilant when it comes to matters of money and ethics, holding himself to a higher standard than even what’s dictated by law. There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far. As the first African American family in the White House, we were being viewed as representatives of our race. Any error or lapse in judgment, we knew, would be magnified, read as something more than what it was.”  

— Michelle Obama in “Becoming,”  Page 295

Next up, I finished Maine author Susan Conley’s slim novel “Elsey Come Home” that came out in January. It’s a bit of a different, meditative kind of novel, told in the first person, about a woman who’s struggling in her life, to find a balance between being a wife, a parent to two young daughters, and a successful painter. She and her family are expats living in Beijing, China, when her Danish husband suggests she go on a one week group yoga retreat to the mountains to stop her alcoholic drinking. 

Elsey’s afraid she will lose her marriage and family, so she grudgingly goes on the retreat, where she meets a number of other people with similar problems. There she appears to be on the verge of a breakdown and is grasping to work through issues from her past (her sister’s death in childhood) and her present (her drinking and the balancing of being a parent with being an artist). You have to keep reading to see whether Elsey can reclaim her life and keep her family in tact. As it went on, the more I became involved in her plight to hold on and turn her downward spiral around. 

I guess I can best describe it as a meditative, expat novel that talks about far away places and the heart strings of family connections. It’s a sparsely told story that sort of sneaked up on me. Elsey’s two kids (and even her husband), who she so adores and await her return from the retreat, are so well done in the book, that you find yourself rooting hard, despite her seemingly unyielding slide, for a positive ending. I’m not sure I always thought Elsey was that likable or relatable, but I did sympathize with her to some extent. In the end, I found it an oddly moving tale about love of family and place.  

That’s all for now. What about you — have you read these books, and if so, what did you think?