Allies. Outwardly, it seemed like a perfect existence for an intellectual, civic-
minded guy in his thirties who’d flatly turned down any number of more
lucrative and prestigious options in favor of his principles. He’d done it, as far as I
was concerned. He’d found a noble balance. He was a lawyer, a teacher, and also
an organizer. And he was soon to be a published author, too.
After returning from Bali, Barack had spent more than a year writing a
second draft of his book during the hours he wasn’t at one of his jobs. He worked
late at night in a small room we’d converted to a study at the rear of our
apartment—a crowded, book-strewn bunker I referred to lovingly as the Hole.
I’d sometimes go in, stepping over his piles of paper to sit on the ottoman in
front of his chair while he worked, trying to lasso him with a joke and a smile, to
tease him back from whatever far-off fields he’d been galloping through. He was
good-humored about my intrusions, but only if I didn’t stay too long.
Barack, I’ve come to understand, is the sort of person who needs a hole, a
closed-off little warren where he can read and write undisturbed. It’s like a hatch
that opens directly onto the spacious skies of his brain. Time spent there seems to
fuel him. In deference to this, we’ve managed to create some version of a hole
inside every home we’ve ever lived in—any quiet corner or alcove will do. To
this day, when we arrive at a rental house in Hawaii or on Martha’s Vineyard,
Barack goes off looking for an empty room that can serve as the vacation hole.
There, he can flip between the six or seven books he’s reading simultaneously
and toss his newspapers on the floor. For him, the Hole is a kind of sacred high
place, where insights are birthed and clarity comes to visit. For me, it’s an off-
putting and disorderly mess. One requirement has always been that the Hole,
wherever it is, have a door so that I can shut it. For obvious reasons.
Dreams from My Father was published, finally, in the summer of 1995. It got
good reviews yet sold only modestly, but that was okay. The important thing was
that Barack had managed to process his life story, snapping together the disparate
pieces of his Afro-Kansan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Chicagoan identity, writing
himself into a sort of wholeness this way. I was proud of him. Through the
narrative, he’d made a kind of literary peace with his phantom father. The work
to get there had been one-sided, of course, with Barack alone trying to fill every
gap and understand every mystery the senior Obama had ever created. But this
was also in keeping with how he’d always done it anyway. Since the time he was
a boy, I realized, he’d tried to carry everything all on his own.