I

The media response to Barack’s speech was hyperbolic. “I’ve just seen the
first black president,” Chris Matthews declared to his fellow commentators on
NBC. A front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune the next day read simply,
“The Phenom.” Barack’s cell phone began to ring nonstop. Cable pundits were
dubbing him a “rock star” and an “overnight success,” as if he hadn’t spent years
working up to that moment onstage, as if the speech had created him instead of
the other way around. Still, the speech was the beginning of something new, not
just for him, but for us, our whole family. We were swept into another level of
exposure and into the swift current of other people’s expectations.

It was surreal, the whole thing. All I could do, really, was joke about it.
“Must’ve been a good speech,” I’d say with a shrug as people began
stopping Barack on the street to ask for his autograph or to tell him they’d loved
what he’d said. “Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when we walked out of a
restaurant in Chicago to find that a crowd had gathered on the sidewalk to wait
for him. I said the same thing when journalists started asking for Barack’s
thoughts on important national issues, when big-time political strategists started to
hover around him, and when nine years after publication the formerly obscure
Dreams from My Father got a paperback reissue and landed on the New York Times
bestseller list.

“Must’ve been a good speech,” I said when a beaming, bustling Oprah
Winfrey showed up at our house to spend a day interviewing us for her
magazine.

What was happening to us? I almost couldn’t track it. In November, Barack
was elected to the U.S. Senate, winning 70 percent of the vote statewide, the
largest margin in Illinois history and the biggest landslide of any Senate race in the
country that year. He’d won significant majorities among blacks, whites, and
Latinos; men and women; rich and poor; urban, suburban, and rural. At one
point, we went to Arizona for a quick getaway, and he was mobbed by well-
wishers there. This for me felt like a true and odd measure of his fame: Even
white people were recognizing him now.

took what was left of my normalcy and wrapped myself in it. When we were
at home, everything was the same. When we were with our friends and family,
everything was the same. With our kids, it was always the same. But outside,