April 22--Woven throughout Northwestern University professor Peter Slevin's new biography of first lady Michelle Obama is a story of balance.
"Michelle Obama: A Life" (Knopf) is a soaring 346-page tale of race, Chicago, a historic election night and all that came before and after it, told through the lens of the South Side girl who, through her grace, passion and belief in a better future, would do her best to lead the nation toward its best self.
"This is a story about Michelle Obama, but it's also a story about our times," Slevin told an audience gathered in Evanston on Tuesday to hear him discuss the book, which was released April 7. "She reflects so much of what has and hasn't happened -- the progress that has been made and the ways that we are still struggling -- over the last 50 years."
Slevin spells out the progress and the stagnation, in both the city and the nation, in gorgeous, exacting detail, with Obama as proxy.
"As I watched at close range, it became clear that Michelle merited a book that placed her at the center of her own narrative," writes Slevin, who worked as a reporter for The Washington Post during the Obamas' first White House campaign. "Not simply as the wife of the famous Barack, nor simply as first lady."
The portrait that emerges -- from her first year as an associate at Chicago law firm Sidley Austin, to her early days as a mother, to her fast and furious introduction to Washington -- is of a woman who has fought and earned the right to do it all, and who rejects the notion that she should do it all alone.
My favorite moment in the book occurs when Barack Obama, in his second year in the U.S. Senate in 2006, calls home to tell his wife about an anti-proliferation bill he co-sponsored that was making progress on the Senate floor.
"He launched into an exuberant explanation, but Michelle cut him off," Slevin writes. "'We have ants,' she said. 'I found ants in the kitchen. And in the bathroom upstairs.' She wanted him to pick up ant traps on his way home from the airport. She would do it herself, she said, but the girls had doctors' appointments after school. 'Ant traps. Don't forget, OK, honey? And buy more than one. Listen, I need to go into a meeting. Love you.'
"Barack said he wondered as he hung up whether Ted Kennedy or John McCain ever bought ant traps on the way home from work."
I spoke with Slevin on Wednesday morning about the balance theme that permeates his story.
"Michelle made it clear when they embarked on the presidential campaign that she was not going to turn her daughters over to caregivers and go out on the road," Slevin told me. "That was not the mother she intended to be. She curtailed her schedule and tried to keep travel to one day a week. She asked her staff to schedule campaign appearances late in the morning so at least she could get her girls to school. And on good days, she would fly to an event after dropping the girls in the morning and hurry back that evening so she could put them to bed."
The couple struggled mightily to achieve equality and balance within the marriage, with Barack Obama traveling and campaigning for weeks and months at a time during most of their daughters Malia and Sasha's young lives.
"Like many professional women of her age and station," Slevin writes, "Michelle was struggling with balance and a partner who was less involved -- and less evolved -- than she had expected."
"Michelle and Barack speak about this ongoing conversation in their lives," Slevin told me Wednesday, and referred to the president writing in one of his books "that Michelle would speak up about what she needed from Barack and what he was not giving the family when he was so busy.
"He writes that he was, at first, perplexed," Slevin continued. "He said, 'It's not like I ask you to darn my socks. It's not like I'm out carousing with the boys.' And she says, 'That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about trying to establish an equal partnership.' She took on the lion's share of managing a household and it was only over time that he realized she was doing that."
Slevin writes about Michelle's internal struggle to live up to her own mother's example while excelling in her profession. "Competing visions of herself were at war," Slevin recalls Barack saying. "'The desire to be the woman her mother had been, solid, dependable, making a home and always there for her kids; and the desire to excel in her profession, to make her mark on the world and realize all of those plans she'd had on the very first day we met."
She and Barack met, of course, at Sidley Austin, after she had earned degrees at Princeton and Harvard Law School. She left the law firm to work for Mayor Richard M. Daley, before becoming executive director for the Chicago office of the youth leadership-training nonprofit Public Allies, then an associate dean at University of Chicago and, finally, vice president for community and external affairs at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
She had a career that was well worth working their lives around. And yet ...
When Sasha was a newborn, Slevin writes, Michelle found herself resenting that she always handled the 4 a.m. feeding while Barack slept, having stayed up late writing or reading, or watching his beloved ESPN.
"It dawned on her that if she escaped to the gym, Barack would have to get up to feed Sasha," he writes. "So, she started slipping out of the house before dawn to drive to a gym in Chicago's West Loop. By the time she arrived home, Barack would have Sasha and Malia up and fed."
The first lady is often credited with keeping her husband grounded. "If Barack was a helium balloon, Michelle was the one holding the string," Slevin writes.
More than that, though, she reminds him not to lose sight of what's valuable and true: his family, his wife and daughters, to whom he is the one and only.
When Michelle and Barack were deciding whether he would run for president the first time, she was slow to embrace the idea of handing their lives over to politics.
"It was the White House, it was his ambition, it was his life," Slevin writes. "And yet it was her life, too, and the lives of their daughters, their family and friends."
"'The selfish part of me says, 'Run away! Just say no!' because my life would be better,' she said in the book. 'But that's the problem we face as a society, we have to stop making the me decision and we have to make the we and us decision.'
"She was in," Slevin writes.
And so was her brand of balance, which is, like many of our own brands, more of an evolving, calibrating equation than a final destination.
It's something to strive for and speak up for. And I'm grateful for her lead.
hstevens@tribpub.com
Printer's Row event
Join Heidi Stevens as she talks to literary icon and beloved author Judy Blume about her new book, "In the Unlikely Event," as part of the Chicago Tribune's Printers Row series and the Chicago Humanities Festival. The event takes place at 7 p.m. on June 17 at Francis W. Parker School in Chicago. Tickets are $15 at http://www.chicagohumanities.org/events.
