© Getty Images Michelle Obama offers advice with release of young readers' edition of 'Becoming' memoirFormer first lady Michelle Obama has a message for young readers with the release of a new edition of her 'Becoming' memoir meant for them: 'You never stop becoming.'
'It is OK not to know who you are or exactly what you want to be or do right now,' Obama says in a video posted to Twitter on Tuesday to mark the new edition's release.
Today's the day! You can find the young readers' edition and paperback edition of Becoming wherever books are sold. I'm so grateful to have this opportunity to widen our community, and I'm especially excited for young people to read along as they begin their journeys of becoming. pic.twitter.com/iUonQxJ91l
Fresh off the presses and flitting about the lists, Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is the memoir of a woman who fashioned a fictional identity for herself, launched it on Twitter, and developed a large following - due primarily to this character's cleverness, her kindness, and her inclusive nature. “Becoming” is about Michelle’s childhood, her Ivy league education, her career, her abiding love for her husband and children and her country, her years at the White house, but above all, it is about a woman who steadfastly holds on to her identity in spite of being married to the most powerful man in the world.
- Michelle Obama (@MichelleObama) March 2, 2021Becoming Memoirist
'You may feel like once you're grown that you're supposed to have all the answers. That there's a point in your life when you will feel settled and everything will feel certain and all of those anxieties will just fade away,' the former first lady says, warning that those assumptions are untrue.
'If you're my age or older, you kind of chuckle at the notion that somehow or someday you wake up and the fog goes away and life is all just clear,' she says. 'But the process of becoming doesn't work that way.'
Obama goes on to explain that figuring out who you are in life is an ongoing process that can not be defined in one moment.
'It's not like you wake up one day and you are who you were intended to be and that is that,' she says. 'It is a process. It is an ever-evolving process. You never stop becoming, you never stop growing. You are always changing.'
Obama first announced the young readers edition of her best-selling book last month. It is marketed toward children ages 10 and up and will include a new introduction.
Becoming Michelle Obama Memoir
A paperback version of 'Becoming' was also released on Tuesday.
Obama also shared her excitement about the new release in an Instagram post writing, 'There is no feeling quite like holding a copy of your own book! And I'm so excited for you all to read the young readers' and paperback editions of Becoming. I'd love to see your photos and reflections!'
A post shared by Michelle Obama (@michelleobama)
© Provided by Tuscaloosa News Don NobleIn these difficult times, humorists are to be treasured. We should take them hot soup, make sure they are dressed warmly.
We need them and there are too few — Roy Blount, George Singleton, Tim Dorsey, Carl Hiaasen, a few others. Paraphrasing the statement about the famous bird: humorists don’t do one thing except make jokes for us to enjoy, and Harrison Scott Key is one of the best, winning, in 2015, the James Thurber Prize for his first book, a memoir about growing up in Coldwater, Mississippi, in a complicated family with a very difficult father.
The family was complicated, he learned over time, because his mother had married Gene, who divorced her, then married aunt Faye and died, then Mom married Pop who was aunt Faye’s brother. Harrison and his brother Bird had the same mother but were also cousins. A diagram was needed.
Key says when he heard the tale his first wish was to unhear it. Let’s leave it at that.
The difficult part was, as has been the case for boy children since Oedipus, his relationship with his dad.
Pop, a big, strong, angry disappointed man who traveled the state as a salesman for an asphalt company, wanted his boy to hunt, fish, kill things, to be a real man in Mississippi.
Reluctantly, sometimes against his will, Key obliged, even as child, rising at 4 a.m. to sit bundled in the pre-dawn freezing woods waiting for something to kill. He rarely succeeded but was still required to learn how to skin, gut, dismantle animals.
It’s funny when Key tells it.
The family lived in a rural area. Key describes his classmates: “everybody had scabs and scars and wounds. …There were boys with leg braces, missing teeth, broken hands from animal attacks. There was a boy with a dent in his head deep enough to catch rainwater.”
Key asked how that happened.
The answer: “Hatchet fight.”
Key was an adequate athlete, pleasing Pop by playing football and baseball in high school — until he quit. Although no one in his hometown seemed interested in anything that went on anywhere else, books were his escape, giving him “a thousand vistas into a thousand worlds, worlds without goats on roofs or chickens in trucks.”
One scene needs highlighting. Pop, coaching a pee-wee football team and determined to win, took Harrison, a big teenager, to Pearl, Mississippi, and used him as a ringer. Harrison towered over the little kids, who, having been told he was their age, regarded him as mentally slow or with a gland problem.
Key got into the spirit of the thing, ran literally over the pee-wees, and the score was 63-0.
Key has written the screenplay for this scene.
Sometimes comical, Key’s childhood was also painful. Pop did not spare the rod — there were whippings with a leather belt. To Pop’s dismay, Key became interested in theater, literature, and stand-up comedy. He would end up with four college degrees, teach, marry.
One Thanksgiving he brings his wife home, always risky business. Pop does not disappoint:
“I think your thighs may be getting bigger,” he tells her and it gets worse over time with a debate over the aesthetics of breast feeding. From time to time, Key admits, he often hated his dad, but, of course, he loved Pop, too. The book ends in fact with the word “love.”
“Congratulations,” the second comic memoir, covers some of the same ground, but explains why “World’s Largest Man” took so long to write.
For over 10 years Key had struggled, writing short stories, plays, articles, amassing a mountain of rejection slips, rising at dawn not to sit in the freezing woods but to write in cafes.
He would work all day and was exhausted, sometimes emotionally unavailable in the evenings, endangering his marriage, until his epiphany. He found his “voice” and his subject. In his hyperbolic, sardonic style, he would tell the story of his bizarre childhood.
Success follows with an exhausting 100-city book tour: more early rising, airplanes, bad hotels, hasty breakfast buffets, disappointingly small audiences — agony described in hilarious detail.
A commonplace among authors: The only thing worse than being sent on a book tour is if your publisher won’t send you on a book tour.
Key is now at home in Savannah, Georgia, with his wife and three daughters, writing his third book which, we are told, is NOT the story of how he came to write his second book.
Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.
“The World’s Largest Man: A Memoir”
Author: Harrison Scott Key
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 235
Price: $26.99 (Hardcover)
“Congratulations: Who Are You Again? A Memoir”
Author: Harrison Scott Key
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Price: $15.99 (Paper)
Pages: 346
Don NobleThis article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: DON NOBLE: Comic memoirs describe growing up in Mississippi and becoming an author