Becoming Audiobook by Michelle Obama
2020 Grammy Award · Best Spoken Word Album
Michelle Obama's memoir traces the long arc from a working-class childhood on Chicago's South Side to eight years in the White House, and resists the easy gloss of a political success story. It's most alive in the ordinary details, and most persuasive when it admits how hard the becoming actually was.
Why the audiobook wins
Michelle Obama reads her own memoir, and that choice alone reframes the book: the South Side girlhood, the White House years, the doubt she admits to along the way all arrive in the voice of the person who actually lived them, with the specific cadences and emphases only she would know to give certain sentences. It's why this recording won the Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album, a rare crossover honor for an audiobook.
At nearly nineteen hours, it's a long, unhurried listen, well suited to a stretch of commutes or a cross-country drive, and that length lets the ordinary details, the apartment above her great-aunt's, her father's shift work despite his multiple sclerosis, breathe the way they're meant to instead of compressing into highlight reel.
Hearing Obama narrate her own becoming, doubts and all, is different from reading about it, and one Audible credit covers the entire journey.
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