Michelle Obama talks about her book ‘Light We Carry’ in Chicago with David Letterman: ‘The world made me practice liking myself’

Michelle Obama doesn’t tour for a book.

She appears. She materializes, like a fond memory from a better time, suddenly in front of you again, barely aged. She has become the closest thing — arguably — America has to royalty. That’s not opinion. That’s just very selective facts.

“Becoming,” her previous memoir, sold 17 million copies worldwide and that book tour, four years ago, played sold-out arenas. Her new book, “The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times” — though pulling no way near the record-breaking numbers of “Becoming” — is poised to be the holiday’s bestselling book. Her new tour, at the Chicago Theatre on Monday and Tuesday nights for two sold-out talks, opens with a video montage of triumphant images of her last tour, only to mute into pandemic, division, violence — a far heavier America.

For season two of the Michelle Obama Show — at least at the Chicago Theatre, before her hometown, her mother and family, former campaign staffers and Loop co-workers — she brought along David Letterman. On Tuesday night the interview is with author Heather McGhee; at various stops on the monthlong six-city tour, she’s being interviewed by Tyler Perry, Conan O’Brien, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah Winfrey. But Chicago got Letterman, and with the country roiled by an existential sense of unease and splintering, he was exactly the right man for this job. Famously averse to phoniness and canned responses, Letterman, now with a long Santa Claus beard at 75, still exudes a vital off-kilter aroma of mischief, discomfort, warmth and thoughtfulness. The full depth of that intelligence may be wasted in this role of professional hype man, but he’s far from insincere. He told Obama that she was the way a person should be.

He noted she often tops polls of the most admired people in North America.

He laid it on thick and yet it didn’t really sound as obsequious as that suggests. Referring to the way Barack Obama gave his wife full veto power over running for president in the first place, Letterman wondered what the world would look like if she had said no. He stopped short of asking her the obvious: Why not run for president herself?

I suspect, unlike most of Monday night’s somewhat scripted conversation, no good can come from sidestepping or excusing one’s self before such a question. But considering the loud, electric welcome she received in her hometown, it was on a lot of minds. If Donald Trump can win a presidency on the grounds that, as his supporters often say, he’s authentic, Michelle Obama could win two terms. She reads now like the right kind of royalty — that is to say, unlike the British sort, her appeal isn’t a chance of lineage or even marriage. She’s always seemed thrust into the role, though wholly prepared.

She described the beginning of any long-lasting marriage as “ten really bad years of I can’t stand you.” She recalled the excitement of leaving a Chicago winter to visit Barack Obama’s maternal grandmother in Hawaii during Christmas, only to find herself far from a beach, in a cinder block apartment, doing puzzles on TV trays and watching “60 Minutes” with his family. She wore braids but noted, had she worn braids as a first lady, in the White House, someone would have surely coined them her “terrorist braids.” When a grotesque Time magazine cover caricature of her squeezing a puny Barack by the neck was shown on a screen behind her and Letterman — who looked shocked by the image — Obama said that cover was the first time she felt like she was “value-added.”

“Yeah, but that transcends politics,” Letterman said, gesturing at the screen.

In the early days of the Obama White House, she was cheap entertainment.

She recoiled at the memory of being portrayed by media and politicians as “the angry Black woman.” Though, in a way, it foretold the Trump White House to follow. Trump — whom she referred to as “that president” — and the dark energy of his White House is like the churning, mostly unspoken subtext of the Obamas’ story now. When Letterman asked if it’s easier to be an advocate for social causes outside of the White House, she noted the power of a presidential pulpit, yet maybe not everyone should be president.

Tellingly, “The Light We Carry,” alongside the more traditional memoir of “Becoming,” is firmly a work of self-help, from a woman who also found the demolitions of the presidency following Barack Obama’s hard to stomach. “Our heads had been spinning,” she said, “what was going to come of this country, how bad could it get — what we didn’t know was how quickly it would get as bad as it got. That’s the state I was in as I thinking how do you keep yourself from falling in a deep, deep dark depression in these times.”

She learned, “There is power getting a thing done.”

She started knitting, which offered a metaphorical lesson for overcoming uncertain times: She might not be able to change the world right now, but with “this thing in my lap, this small thing,” she could only work and work and work until she was finished.

It’s easy to eye-roll at so many poster-ready aphorisms delivered in such a short period of time — particularly in front of David Letterman, once a human assembly line of irony. But Obama was often firmly Chicago and specific. Showing a picture of her older brother, Craig Robinson, looking deeply concerned even as a young child, she said: “He was a very worried little boy ... We thought it was funny but he was preparing for the worst. He would walk around like he was blind just in case he lost his eyesight. He had our family practicing fire drills because if the house caught on fire, he needed to be able to carry my father out ... He would tie his right hand behind his back so he could learn to use his left hand in the event he lost use of his right.” She recalled her father, who developed multiple sclerosis, “managing his disability with humor and courage.” He would fall with a thunder. But he taught her, she said, you fall, you get up. She talked about coming home to complain she wasn’t getting homework. So her mother complained to the school. She thinks often about the classmates who didn’t have a mother to speak up for them.

“By the time I got to high school, when I wanted to go to Princeton, I had a counselor who looked me square in the eye and said ‘I don’t think you’re Princeton material.’ ‘And that is based on what? You didn’t ask me my grades. You don’t know me at all. But you’re setting my bar low.’ The world made me practice liking myself. That is a tool for young people. You cannot wait for someone to see you. There are people don’t even know you exist. They don’t know your pain. If you’re poor and live in a rural county, if you are not in the best school system, if you are a woman — there are many ways to make us an ‘other.’ For some, when it happens, it breaks us. For me, I just happened to be that smart aleck kid who was like ‘I will show you.’ So by the time I got to the White House, that’s what I felt. When I saw that (Time magazine) picture, I was like, ‘Oh, you don’t think I’m going to be the best first lady? I’m going to work so hard. You just wait!’”

The theater erupted.

Letterman said, “Well, you don’t really need me out here, do ya?”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com

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