Bingo Square: Far and Away
Michelle Obama takes us on the journey through her life, from her happy childhood on the South Side of Chicago, through her college years at Princeton and Harvard, her early career as a lawyer and her yearning for something more, to meeting her husband at her law firm when he was a law student and she was his mentor. We get to see them fall in love and weather some distance apart, as well as the struggles she felt throughout his political career, when he was away from their family for long stretches of time and on to presidential election and figuring out where she fit within the White House.
It’s extremely well written, although I don’t think it’s a surprise that she’s good with words. But it’s one I fell into very easily, the descriptions making it easy to imagine her home and her family and what life was like for her growing up. It feels very straight-talking, but never in a way that’s trying to score points. This is her truth and she tells it in a beautiful way.
I have this for my Far and Away square because as a white woman from the north of England an African American First Lady of the United States is something I’ll never be. I wasn’t initially going to have this for bingo but as I read there were parts of her story that really resonated with me, even though our lives are so different (a theme which I think comes across in the book – we’re all more alike than we might think). This was especially so in her early chapters, of going away to university and trying to find her way there with little help, navigating a whole new world as one of the first in her family to go, of feeling far away from your family and that distance only growing the longer you are away. And her sort of unimpressed dismissiveness on first encountering Barack Obama (he was late!) reminded me of when I first saw my partner when I was 18 years old and thought ‘I’ll be sure to stay away from him!’ And twenty years later we have moved across the world together and are raising two daughters. Sure, we’re not in the White House with the whole world’s eyes upon us, but in tiny ways the lives we all live have more in common than we might see on the surface. It’s that kind of optimism that she ends with. Instead of spending our lives in fear of The Other, let’s be open to each other. “Let’s invite one another in.”
Bingo: Remix, True Story, Far and Away, Youths!, Reading the TBR