Becoming

together in the otherwise crowded room. She was wearing a pair of pristine white gloves an ...

an ethnic minority; a fifth of them were the children of immigrants or asylum seekers. I was draw ...

B the United States, I was more like them than they knew. That I, too, was from a working-class ...

lines they needed to protect the grounds. We ran tests to determine whether the soil had enough nutrien ...

me. All we could do then was put our faith into the effort, trusting that with sun and rain and time, ...

O 21 ne Saturday evening at the end of May, Barack took me out on a date. In the four months since beco ...

been planned meticulously in advance by our scheduling teams and the Secret Service, meant ...

shaking. Anytime old friends came to visit us at the White House, they were amused by the in ...

makeup artist recently tried and failed to put false eyelashes on my mom before a photo shoot, Barack tippe ...

F It was as if with our date Barack and I had tested a theory and proven both the best and the worst parts ...

worried that I wasn’t going to show my full self. Regardless of what I chose to do, I knew I ...

sections of big cities didn’t have grocery stores in their neighborhoods. Rural shoppers across larg ...

Valley. We visited the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to see how dollars got made and toured Frederick Douglass ...

Sometime during Barack’s campaign, people had begun paying attention to my clothes. Or at least the ...

designers and had a playful sense of color and texture. After Barack’s election, I was able to persuade ...

to mention nightmare scenarios involving spilled wine or broken zippers. I learned, too, that i ...

T exchanging advice, syncing our schedules, and reviewing every plan. The president’s advisers in my o ...

went after the cucumbers. Each time something went a little awry, with the help of Jim Adams, th ...

House garden, I mentioned that many Americans had trouble accessing fresh produce in their comm ...

issue, but now I had the benefit of operating from a huge platform. I was beginning to re ...