Exhale Book Club Discussion Guide

Exhale Book Club Discussion Guide November: Becoming by Michelle Obama * Tere may be spoilers in this. You’ve been warned! * Michelle Obama’s memoir, Becoming, follows her life from childhood up to the “Now I think it’s one of the most useless questions an adult can present day — or at least close to the ask a child—What do you want to be when you grow up? present day. We learn about her family of origin, her upbringing, her time at As if growing up is fnite. As if at some point you become Princeton, and her frst impressions of a something and that’s the end.” - p. ix young Barack Obama (spoiler: achievement-oriented Michelle Robinson was not impressed). We get a sense in these pages of a woman who has adapted to what life has given her, from that little house on Euclid Avenue to the larger one at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In the frst pages of her memoir, Michelle Obama describes living above where her Aunt Robbie taught piano lessons. Of the experience, Obama writes “Te sound people trying, however, became the soundtrack to our life.” - p. 3 Q1: What impact do you think hearing over and over again other people striving toward something but often getting it wrong had on Obama and her brother? On their parents? Q2: Do you think the same is true for us when we create in true community, like in Exhale, where we share our frst and second drafts (and third and ffth and ninth!), our business-founders, our sketches of things yet to come — we are surrounded by imperfect-yet-pointful striving which encourages us in our own pursuits? “My father, Fraser, taught me to work hard, laugh often, and keep my word. My mother, Marian, showed me how to think for myself and to use my voice. Together, in our cramped apartment on the South Side of Chicago, they helped me see the value in our story, in my story, in the larger story of our country. Even Becoming Reading Guide 1 of 19 when it’s not pretty or perfect. Even when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.” - p. X Q3: Did you learn this in your own family of origin? Why or why not? Q4: Is it something you are instilling in your own children today, actively or not? One of the most powerful lines early in the book that sets the tone for the rest: “Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.” Q5: In a world where context feels hard to fnd and hold onto, this is a gift that Obama’s parents have given to their children. How do you invite context into your own consumption of media, your own reading of other people’s stories? How can we teach our children the same? “I learned one song in the piano book and then another. I was probably no better than her other students, no less fumbling, but I was driven. To me, there was magic in the learning. I got a buzzy sort of satisfaction from it. For one thing, I’d picked up on the simple, encouraging correlation between how long I practiced and how much I achieved.” - p. 11 Obama’s story of learning piano with Aunt Robbie is hilarious. Of course she tried to challenge the carefully-crafted system, hopping ahead to more exciting things rather than plodding along at Robbie’s pace. Q6: We all know that “practice makes perfect” — or at least practice makes progress. But it can be hard to keep plucking along at our creative pursuits when it feels like we’re not getting anywhere. What’s an area of practice that you would like to develop more in your own life? How do you think you could approach that successfully? When Obama’s second-grade classroom turns out to be a chaotic learning environment where she and other kids are being held back by a teacher who didn’t know how to control her classroom or challenge her students, Obama’s mom quietly campaigns to get her — and a few other high-performing kids — called up a grade. Of the experience, Obama shares this: Becoming Reading Guide 2 of 19 “I didn’t stop to ask myself then what would happen to all the kids who’d been left in the basement with the teacher who couldn’t teach. Now that I’m an adult, I realize that kids know at a very young age when they’re being devalued, when adults aren’t invested enough to help them learn. Teir anger over it can manifest itself as unruliness. It’s hardly their fault. Tey aren’t “bad kids.” Tey’re just trying to survive bad circumstances. At the time, though, I was just happy to have escaped. But I’d learn many years later that my mother, who is by nature wry and quiet but generally also the most forthright person in any room, made a point of seeking out the second-grade teacher and telling her, as kindly as possible, that she had no business teaching and should be working as a drugstore cashier instead.” - p. 21 Obama shares earlier that her mother and father usually kept out of the kids’s battles at school and outside, but here, Obama’s mom steps in to intervene on behalf of her child. Tis is possibly a pivotal moment in Obama’s life: from here, she advances into gifted programs and a high-performing high school, then onto Princeton and a law degree. But it could have gone much differently. Q7: Is there a defning moment in your life that you know nudged you in one direction or another? What was it, and how do you think it affected the trajectory of your future? When they are about ten years old, Michelle Obama’s cousin asks her why she talks “like a white girl” (page 39). Obama explains that speaking a certain way as a child could be perceived as denying her Black culture, of trying to sound “better” than what she was. She discusses this perception not only from her own cousins and other Black people, but also from the nation as a whole when later she and Barack would stand on stages as Ivy-educated Black people who spoke like they were raised in the Midwest — which is exactly what they were. She writes, “America would bring to Barack Obama the same questions my cousin was unconsciously putting to me that day on the stoop: Are you what you appear to be? Do I trust you or not?” (page 40). What her cousin seemed to be asking, and what we often ask each other, is “What group do you belong to and what can I know about you because of that?” As we read earlier in the book, this strips away all context from an individual story, something that Obama’s parents drilled into her from a young age. Q8: In what ways do you group people who look or talk or act differently than you? In what ways is that harmful to seeing other people as individuals? “Failure is a feeling long before it becomes an actual result. It’s vulnerability that breeds with self-doubt and then is escalated, often deliberately, by fear. Tose “feelings of failure” he mentioned were everywhere already in my neighborhood, in the form of parents who couldn’t get ahead fnancially, of kids who were Becoming Reading Guide 3 of 19 starting to suspect that their lives would be no different, of families who watched their better-off neighbors leave for the suburbs or transfer their children to Catholic schools.” - page 43 Obama’s principle at her grade school, Dr. Lavizzo, writes a letter containing the above sentiments to combat an editorial marking their school as now having a “ghetto mentality”. In turn, the school shifts some of it’s resources to create a multi-age classroom where students are grouped by ability, not grade level. Obama benefts from this for the last three years of her high school education, saying “Tere was a clear sense that the school had invested in us, which I think made us all try harder and feel better about ourselves. Te independent learning setup only served to fuel my competitive streak.” (page 44). Q9: When someone invests in you, does it make you work harder? More diligently? If so, how can we create an environment in our own lives where we are investing in ourselves? “I understand now that even a happy marriage can be a vexation, that it’s a contract best renewed and renewed again, even quietly and privately—even alone.” - page 51 Q10: Obama’s mother confesses much later in her years that every Spring she entertained thoughts about leaving her husband. We can all go through versions of this: circumstances that make us want to pack up our family and move to a new place to start over; arguments that make us thing “I wonder what it would be like if…”; a string of events that make us want to burn it all to the ground and start fresh. How do we push through that in order to stay focused, both on our lives and in our creative work? “At Whitney Young, it was safe to be smart.

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