Michelle Obama by Janie Hampton

Sometimes you just know that you are witnessing history: when Kennedy was shot; the first human stepping onto the moon; or when Margaret Thatcher became the first female British prime minister. At other times, history creeps up on you, such as the invention of the internet, or Twiggy getting a damehood for being the face of the 1960s.
I'm not sure whether Michelle Obama crept up on me or exploded into my consciousness. But her autobiography makes it clear that her extraordinary life has been one of determination and immaculate planning. She can’t have known that she would find herself living in the White House, but it sure took some hard graft to get there. If she had not backed her husband so resolutely, it's unlikely there would have been an African-American President of the United States in 2008.
When ‘Becoming’ was published last year, the headlines were all about Michelle’s miscarriage, her daughters born by IVF, and the marriage guidance counselling. ‘How tedious,’ I thought. ‘These are such stereotypical women's issues. Isn’t she a clever feminist, fighting for our rights to be equal?’ But having read the book, I now see it was just typical journalism, and we all know that most journalists don't bother to read a whole book, especially one that is 428 pages long.

Happy First Family

I'm really glad I have read this, all of it. I feel as if I have witnessed history as it unfurls. Michelle Obama comes over as an extraordinary woman, even if this is her own version of her life. She was born into a poor but loving and hardworking African-American family on the rough side of Chicago. Her great great grandparents were slaves; her parents were unable to get the education they deserved. Michelle Robinson grew up knowing that as a female of colour, she had to put in the extra mile, if not ten miles, to get anywhere. She did, and then met Barack Obama who had similar ethics and aspirations. They fell in love slowly, which meant she wasn’t blind to his annoyances. (Most of which are the traits of a super-human angel, such as no interest in material things, a total focus on the job or person, and an indifference to his own good looks.)
She is honest, not just about the difficulties in getting pregnant, but also her resistance to politics and her husband's desire to be president. She made huge personal sacrifices, but refused to give up being a good parent, and managed to raise two sensible daughters under the relentless glare of the media.
Michelle is no non-speaking fashion model, like the current First Lady of the US. As soon as the first presidential election was won, she said to herself, ‘How can I use this unique platform for the greatest good?’ But she had to navigate what was, and was not, acceptable for a FLOTUS to do. She looked at previous First Ladies and decided that she didn’t want to arrange flowers, but nor did she want to be seen to be involved in her husband's political work, as Hilary Clinton had. So she concentrated on childhood nutrition, families of servicemen, and inspiring under-privileged young people to do better. Following her visit to a girls’ state school in London the girls were so affected that their grades and university admissions noticeably improved.

The First Lady of the United States at home.

It is fascinating to learn what it feels like to live in the lap of luxury in the White House, but never be allowed to open the bullet-proof bedroom windows; to have an army of domestic staff, but still have to pay for whatever food that they have chosen to cook for you.By travelling inside a plane with Michelle as she zig zagged around the nation, I started to understand the bizarre system of elections in the USA. When she nearly has a breakdown from the exhausting regime, she gave herself ‘Me Time’, by getting up at dawn and going to the gym! There were times when I thought, ‘This woman is too perfect, a worker, wife and mother.’ But then she admits to her failures, doubts and the problem of juggling all those lives. That’s a theme that makes this book part of the history of women. Michelle Obama's life is unusual, but it is also typical of the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s one we can all identify with: how can we have it all, and not collapse in a heap?

Michelle Robinson Obama by Amy Sherald, 2018.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian INstitute, USA

I was surprised not just by the message of this book, but by its style too. It is beautifully written, and copy-edited to a T. Apart from the odd reference to US television programmes that I'd never heard of, I never stumbled over a sentence, or got bored of a topic. I don't believe that a highly trained lawyer such as Michelle can write in her own voice so fluently without help. She thanks ‘an incredibly gifted team of collaborators’ in the acknowledgments, and I can picture experienced ghost writers sitting with her and a tape recorder, quizzing her for the details that bring her story to life. What were you wearing that day? What was the weather like? How did you feel inside? It is all there, and makes the book and her life readable, and believable. For once, I’m grateful to ghostwriters. They have enhanced her story, and made it feel more real than she probably could. (Apologies, Michelle, if you wrote every word yourself! You are even more talented than I imagined.)
I predict that the compelling life of Michelle Obama will be retold in many a school history lesson about ‘Great and Inspiring Women of the 21st Century’. Read this candid and powerful book now, and be ready to tell your grand-daughters all about her. She will inspire them that anything is possible: they don’t need special talents, just plain old-fashioned perseverance.

Women on the campaign trail
Copyright Charlie Neibergall Associated Press

‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama, published by Penguin Viking, 2018.

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Lincoln in The Bardo by Catherine Hokin

 "Mary Lincoln's health had never been good and the loss of young Willie ended her life as a functional wife and mother."

"A Mother's Trial: Mary Lincoln and the Civil War" by Jayne Coster

"Where was her boy? she kept asking. Where was he? Couldn't someone find him, bring him to her at once? Mustn't he yet be somewhere?"

Account of Sophie Lenox, maid in "Eyewitness to History: The Lincoln White House" ed. Stone Hilyard

 Willie Lincoln in 1861

There are books that play with structure that make you want to weep as you stumble around like an extra in the Emperor's New Clothes wondering what on earth the critics are raving about. And there are books that play with structure that make you want to sing - such a one is George Saunders' wonderful tour-de-force Booker shortlisted Lincoln in the Bardo. For those of you don't know (and I promise there will be no spoilers), the novel centres on the death in 1862 of Willie Lincoln, the 11 year old son of Abraham Lincoln, from typhoid fever.

Willie was not the only one of the Lincoln's sons to die - in fact only one of their four survived to adulthood - but he is widely attested as being his parent's favourite and contemporary accounts of his death are harrowing. Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who was Mary Lincoln's seamstress and friend (and is one of the voices woven through Bardo) wrote of the president’s grief. “I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder. His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child." There was a reception held at the White House during the last days of Willie's illness (for which many of Lincoln's detractors condemned him) and there are numerous accounts of Mrs Lincoln moving constantly to and fro between the ballroom and the child's bedroom where (as Keckley perhaps rather floridly puts it) "the rich notes of the Marine Band in the apartments below came to the sickroom in soft, subdued murmurs, like the wild, faint sobbing of far-off spirits.” 

This was, of course, a personal tragedy in the midst of a public one. On the day Willie was interred, the casualty lists from the battle at Fort Donelson (a Union victory) were published and the scale of these was enormous: a thousand men dead on each side and three times that number wounded. One of the source voices in Bardo (First Lieutenant Daniel Brower, in 'These Battle Memories') describes the bodies as "Heaped and piled like threshed wheat, one on top of two, on top of three." 

 The crypt where Willie was first interred

The image of Lincoln mourning his son as he tries to hold the Union on a steady and increasingly bloody course is a poignant one. Willie was interred in Oak Hill Cemetery, in a borrowed crypt, with the intention that his body would be eventually returned to Lincoln's home state of Illinois. On the night of the funeral, and after, Lincoln is known to have visited the crypt alone and this is where the novel starts. Young Willie is trapped in the bardo - a Tibetan Buddhist term which refers to a transitional state between the worlds of the living and the dead - where children, according to one of the novel's voices, Roger Bevins iii, are not meant to tarry. It seems that it is Lincoln's great love that is holding his son in this place filled with confused and wandering spirits who do not realise they are dead, actually making the boy's passing harder. It is these spirits, interwoven with contemporary voices, who act then as our narrators.

This is a book that feels like a play - in fact the audiobook runs to a cast of 166. Each spirit has their own voice, the whole novel is told in dialogue and often a character has only a line or two before we skip on to the next. Other than the spirits, we have verbatim contemporary accounts, such as the examples given at the top - the research here is centre-stage not sprinkled. It works, wonderfully - layer upon layer of lost, angry, confused, bitter and sometimes hilarious voices which reflect not only the horror of grief but also the chaos of human life and the ever-present civil war backdrop.

What exactly transpired in Lincoln's visits to the crypt, whether he did in fact have the coffin opened and hold his son's embalmed body, cannot be precisely verified. That a father could not bear to be parted from his son's remains is plausible enough and is really the only fact, beyond the death, we are invited to accept. That the boy's loss had a profound impact on his parents is, however, well-attested. In the following years both, and particularly Mary, created as apotheosis around Willie using phrases such as 'sainted' and 'too precious for this earth' to describe him. Mary remained in her room for weeks, not attending the funeral, requiring the service of a nurse for some months after and removed all her son's belongings from the White House. Keckly's account that “Mrs. Lincoln’s grief was inconsolable. In one of her paroxysms of grief the President kindly bent over his wife, took her by the arm, and gently led her to a window. With a stately, solemn gesture, he pointed to the lunatic asylum. ‘Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.’” has other voices to support it.

There are as many ways to read the novel as there are voices in it. Erica Wagner, writing in the New Statesman calls it "a stunning portrait of a violently divided America" with a particular resonance for the world we live in. For writers and readers of historical fiction, it is a fascinating journey in what can be spun from the smallest nugget of historical fact. Oh and it's also wonderful - did I mention that?