The Light We Carry
Michelle Obama
Penguin Viking
2022, 336p
Purchased personal copy
Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}: Her life. Her learnings. Her toolkit to live boldly.
How do we build enduring and honest relationships?
How can we discover strength and community inside our differences?
What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much?
Michelle Obama believes that when we light up for others, we can illuminate the richness and potential of the world around us, discovering deeper truths and new pathways for progress.
In The Light We Carry, the former First Lady shares her practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today’s highly uncertain world. A mother, daughter, spouse and friend, she shares fresh stories, her insightful reflections on change and the earned wisdom that helps her continue to “become.” With her trademark humour, candour, and compassion, she also explores issues connected to race, gender, and visibility, encouraging readers to work through fear, find strength in community, and live with boldness.
The Light We Carry will inspire readers to examine their own lives, identify their sources of gladness, and connect meaningfully in a turbulent world.
I love Michelle Obama – well, I love both the Obamas. I think I’d read their grocery list. I’ve read both Becoming and A Promised Land. I have read A Promised Land in print and listened to parts of it on audio as well as listened to an entire other Barack Obama memoir, Dreams From My Father on audio as well. I bought this when it first came out, but as is the way with some of my books, it did sit on my shelf for about a year until I plucked it out to include it in my 24 Books in 2024 challenge. It would probably be a good one to have on audio as well as both Obamas are excellent and personable speakers and authors narrating their own work is most often, highly enjoyable.
This was written in the shadow of the covid-19 pandemic, when Barack and Michelle Obama were holed up in their Washington D.C. home with their two college-aged daughters. For an obviously busy person, who has probably been busy her whole life, this down period was a time of reflection for Michelle Obama and as she admits, also a time of worry and anxiety.
Some of this encompasses the tools she uses when she does have those feelings – insecurities, anxieties, fears. A way of visualising and compartmentalising the problem, learning to not just deal with the fear but accept it and acknowledge it. Look, you could look at it as “what does Michelle Obama have to be worried about, she’s a highly successful woman, the first Black First Lady, her own multiple successful careers behind her in law and public health and various other things” but I actually found it highly validating to read. Like if Michelle Obama does have fears and worries, the same as mine in some ways (thinking of her children, the future, her appearance etc) then it makes my own fears and anxieties feel okay and understandable. She talks openly and frankly about knowing that Barack running for President would open their life up to scrutiny and that for her, the scrutiny would encompass her looks and her dress, her style, her ambitions, her very persona. Must avoid being ‘the angry Black woman stereotype’ (there’s a definitely a headline or two referenced where she was described as exactly that). As a Black woman and the first Black First Lady, Obama acknowledges that the standards set for her would be different, the level of judgement would be different, that she could do the same thing as countless First Ladies before her and it would be perceived differently.
One of the things I appreciated the most in this book was the talk of her relationship with those who were and are, closest to her. Firstly her parents – her father had MS and always gave her the advice “You fall. You get up. You carry on.” There’s also her mother, who taught her and her brother to be independent – both of their children were encouraged to aim high (Michelle also laughably talks about the high school careers counsellor who told her she shouldn’t apply to Princeton, because she wasn’t Princeton material. I’m unsure if it was because she was Black, I suspect so, but Obama did graduate from Princeton and then also Harvard law, and it’s a little thing that sticks in her. As she mentioend, that person probably never thought of Michelle Robinson, as she was then, ever again. But Michelle certainly thought of her many times) and achieve the best. When Barack Obama was declared President, Michelle’s mother moved to the White House with them, to help look after their two daughters and just generally provide support. She was often a blunt and frank interview, something for the Press to frantically publish. But despite her no nonsense manner and frank statements, it was obvious a woman who deeply loved her family and was willing to give up her own life and put it on hold, to help them in their new roles. Likewise I got the feeling that Michelle and her brother Craig were close when I read Becoming and that’s only reiterated here. As we all do, Michelle also talks about her expectations vs reality in meeting Barack’s family on her inaugural trip to Hawaii and managing those expectations. About how Barack’s family was different to hers and the ways in which she adjusted to that. And then of course it talks about her relationship with her husband, the ways in which they strengthen and support each other (and the little ways in which they annoy each other too, nothing is perfect!).
I really enjoyed this glimpse into her thoughts and feelings – the fears and anxieties she’d faced, her ways of dealing with them. Her thoughts on the pandemic and the regime that followed her husband’s. And most of all, those relationships that had shaped her life: her parents and brother, her friends (I forgot to mention this earlier but she does have a very large portion devoted to her friends and what they mean to her and how she’s gathered them throughout her life and how they help each other), her husband and her children. She writes in such an intimate and personable way, it’s very relatable even though probably the only thing Michelle Obama and I have in common is that we are both married women with children! This would definitely make a great audio listen, it feels very intimate and confiding but at the same time, very broad and far reaching.
8/10
Book #58 of 2024
I included The Light We Carry in my 24 in 2024 reading challenge! It’s the 5th book read so far for the challenge.
All The Books I Can Read 
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