Books

Michelle Obama ‘hates’ how she looks and grew up with a ‘tiniest kernel of self-loathing’

In The Light We Carry, the former first lady’s second memoir, she also writes about her experience of depression

Since its publication, Obama's first book Becoming has been translated into 50 languages and more than 17 million copies have been sold worldwide. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Lucy Knight
Tue Nov 15 2022 - 11:03

Michelle Obama “hates” how she looks, “all the time and no matter what”, she has revealed in her new book.

The Light We Carry, the former US first lady’s second memoir, builds on her 2018 title Becoming, and aims to be a “toolkit to live boldly”. In the new book, Obama discusses ways to overcome one’s “fearful mind”, which she likens to “a life partner you didn’t choose”.

“I’ve lived with my fearful mind for 58 years now,” she writes. “She makes me uneasy. She likes to see me weak.”

[ Becoming by Michelle Obama: the former first lady gets personal ]

This part of her mind is constantly having negative thoughts about her appearance, Obama writes. There are “plenty of mornings” when she turns on the bathroom light, takes one look at herself in the mirror, and “desperately want[s] to flip it off again”.

READ MORE

I felt a blanket of despondency settling over me, my mind sliding toward a dull place

Her appearance, and her height in particular, she is 180cm (5ft 11in), is something Obama has always been insecure about, she explains in the book. Always “bringing up the rear” at school “created a small wound in me, the tiniest kernel of self-loathing that would keep me from embracing my strengths”.

[ Michelle Obama: World’s most powerful people ‘aren’t that smart’ ]

Obama also admits to experiencing a “low-grade form” of depression during the coronavirus pandemic. “I kept with the work I’d been doing – speaking at virtual voter registration drives, supporting good causes, acknowledging people’s pain – but privately I was finding it harder to access my own hope or to feel like I could make an actual difference,” she writes. When she was approached by the Democrats to speak at the party’s national convention in 2020, she put off responding – although she eventually agreed, calling Donald Trump the “wrong president” in her speech.

It shook me profoundly to hear the man who’d replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs

Any time she thought about the offer to speak at the convention, she felt “stalled out”, she has now disclosed in The Light We Carry. She describes being “caught up in frustration and grief for what, as a country, we’d already lost”.

“I felt a blanket of despondency settling over me, my mind sliding toward a dull place,” she writes. “I was less able to muster optimism or think reasonably about the future. Worse, I felt myself skirting the edges of cynicism – tempted to conclude that I was helpless, to give in to some notion that when it came to the epic problems and massive worries of the day, nothing could be done.”

[ Michelle Obama: Seven things every girl and woman needs to know ]

In The Light We Carry, Obama also reflects on the 2016 presidential election. “Whether or not the 2016 election was a direct rebuke” of her husband, who became the US’s first black president, “it did hurt. It still hurts”, she writes. “It shook me profoundly to hear the man who’d replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically using ethnic slurs, making selfishness and hate somehow acceptable, refusing to condemn white supremacists or to support people demonstrating for racial justice”, she adds. “It felt like something more, something much uglier, than a simple political defeat.”

[ Becoming by Michelle Obama review: a highflying outsider’s view ]

Later in the book, she describes watching the “devastating” 2021 attack on the US Capitol, which was “perhaps the most frightening thing [she had] ever witnessed”.

Since its publication, her first book Becoming has been translated into 50 languages and more than 17 million copies have been sold worldwide. The Light We Carry is expected to similarly top best-seller charts. In 2020, she was named the most admired woman in United States, according to Gallup’s poll, for the third year running. – Guardian

LATEST STORIES