Cheryl Truman on books

Liza Mundy is a staff writer for The Washington Post, and this is no People-magazine profile featuring a beaming happy family (effortless style! doting husband! adoring children!). The pictures aren’t the most flattering, although the one with Michelle Obama shooting silent death rays at Hillary Clinton is a classic.

The book (Simon & Schuster, $25) veers between slam and idealization. It’s odd, and a little painful, in its striving to put Michelle Obama into a mythological template: “She is outspoken likeable, grounded. She may indeed be quick to find fault — with bosses, with America, whatever — but she is also warm and loyal and, truth be told, not much of a rabble rouser.”

You’re left wondering what’s so bad about rabble-rousing, and why a potential First Lady shouldn’t speak, vigorously and whenever she feels like it, on the issues of the day. Taken out of the context of this being a Michelle Obama book, it’s hard to imagine how the same sentence wouldn’t cover Laura Bush. Or Nancy Reagan.
But then there is the other end of the admiration spectrum there is this, about Michelle Obama’s early legal career:

“At least one person, however, found Michelle a challenge to manage. The head of the marketing group was a partner named Quincy White, whom people in the group referred to, fondly, as “Q.” White, now retired, recalls that he recruited Michelle to the group and endeavored to give her the most interesting work he could find, in part because he wanted to do right by her and see her advance, but also because she seemed perennially dissatisfied.”

So really, she isn’t outspoken. Until she is.

The slim volume also includes a fair amount of amateur psychological analysis and wondering-aloud. This feels like lurching toward a point: “As Barack observed when he met her, Michelle does seem to harbor a sense that things could have so easily gone wrong for her, just as they went wrong for some of the people she grew up with — a sense that if she doesn’t work hard to hold it together, everything could still fall apart. She is also aware that things might have gone badly for Barack if he had done his youthful experimenting in a place other than Hawaii.”

Ah, Hawaii! If you’re going to corrupt your youth, best do it there. Or in Kentucky. We’re also often misportrayed as a land of bucolic simpletons. We can sympathize.

And if you’re feeling that things are bit cringe-y, consider this passage about Barack Obama’s rise to presidential candidacy, which feels as if someone is trying too hard for a transition paragraph in a political profile:

“It was more than a political rise; it was a political levitation. A political teleportation. Obama had been beamed up. He had ascended. Overnight he had become a household name. It’s hard to think of a precedent. What political wife has had to adjust to this much intense publicity and fame, this quickly?”

And the answer is: every single one.