Photo: Penguin Random House/AP The Light We Carry, the former First Lady’s second memoir, is based on her 2018 title Becoming and aims to be a “toolbox for living boldly”. In the new book, published in Saturday’s Guardian magazine, Obama discusses ways to overcome the “phobic mind”, which she likens to “a life partner you didn’t choose”. “I’ve been living with my scared mind for 58 years now,” she writes. “It makes me sad. She likes to see me weak.” That part of her mind constantly has negative thoughts about her appearance, Obama writes. There are “many mornings” when she turns on the bathroom light, glances at herself in the mirror and “desperately wants[s] to peel it off again.” Her looks, and her height in particular (she’s 5’11”), is something Obama has always been insecure about, she explains in the book. Always “bringing up the rear” at school “created a little wound inside me, the tiniest kernel of loathing that would keep me from embracing my powers.” Obama also admits to experiencing a “low-grade form” of depression during the coronavirus pandemic. “I carried on with the work I was doing – speaking at virtual voter registration drives, supporting good causes, acknowledging people’s pain – but privately I struggled to access my own hope or feel like I could make a real difference. ” she writes. When she was approached by Democrats to speak at the party’s 2020 national convention, she delayed responding — though she eventually agreed, calling Donald Trump the “wrong president” in her speech. Whenever she considered the offer to speak at the conference, she felt “stuck”, she has now revealed in The Light We Carry. He describes it as “trapped in frustration and grief over what, as a country, we had already lost.” “I felt a blanket of despair fall over me, my mind slipping into a dull place,” she writes. “I was less able to muster optimism or think logically about the future. Worse, I felt myself pushing the boundaries of cynicism – I was tempted to conclude that I was helpless, to surrender to some idea that when it came to the epic problems and enormous concerns of the day, nothing could be done.” 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 first black US president, “it hurt. It still hurts,” she writes. “I was deeply shocked to hear the man who replaced my husband as president openly and unapologetically use racial slurs, make selfishness and hatred somehow acceptable, refuse to condemn white supremacists or support people protesting for racial justice,” he adds. “It felt like something more, something much worse, than just a political defeat.” Later in the book, he describes watching the “disastrous” 2021 attack on Capitol Hill, which was “perhaps the scariest thing [she had] witnesses ever”. 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 hit the top bestseller charts as well. In 2020, she was named the most wonderful woman in America, according to the Gallup poll, for the third year in a row.
