*****
When I was in sixth grade at St. John the Baptist parish school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I had to write an autobiography. This was our English class's big project. Our teacher, Sister St. Bernard (yes, that was her name--don't look at me) talked about the project all the time, pronouncing every syllable of auto-bi-o-graph-eee. Because it was 1977, we wrote our autobiographies by hand, and then cut and pasted (literally, with scissors and paper and paste) individual paragraphs onto multicolored construction paper, adding photographs and drawings and scrapbook elements--birthday invitations and birth announcements and tickets. We drew the cover art with Bic Banana magic markers. The finished products were about 1/2 an inch thick, bound with those old-fashioned brass rivets that you'd poke through paper and spread open on the other side. We passed them around and read passages aloud, and displayed them at parents' night.
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| Q: What was better than a brand-new package of Bic Bananas? A: Nothing |
Last month, I was invited to join a book club, so I went. It was fun. I belonged to a book club about 20 years ago, when book clubs were first popular. Oprah, I guess. That book club dissolved after a few meetings, and I never joined another one, until now.
My new book club read Michelle Obama's autobiography, Becoming. It's like a professionally edited and produced and beautifully written version of our sixth-grade autobiographies, with a much more interesting subject. And that is not a criticism, just a comment on the very big difference between an autobiography and a memoir. I've read lots of memoirs, but not many autobiographies. Unlike a memoir, Becoming is a true autobiography that begins at the beginning and proceeds in an orderly fashion through the middle, winding up with the present day. It's very neat, orderly, and straightforward, much like its author.
That's not to say that there's no introspection or reflection. Michelle Obama knows herself very well, and she analyzes events and patterns in her life through the lens of her own personality traits--her drive and ambition, her need for order and control, her private and introverted nature. But she focuses much more on the facts--the things that happened, and when and how.
Michelle Obama is almost six feet tall, flawlessly beautiful and stylish, and Ivy League-educated; but to my surprise, I found that I actually have a lot in common with her. She grew up in a blue-collar city neighborhood, the daughter of working-class parents, and so did I. She spent over an hour on public transportation, morning and afternoon, every day, becoming familiar with her city during long bus rides to her magnet high school, and so did I. Like me, she craves order and control and routine, all of which she had to give up when her husband ascended to the highest level of achievement in American politics.
*****
After Becoming, I read Sally Bedell Smith's Elizabeth the Queen. Just as an autobiography is very different from a memoir, a biography is very different from an autobiography. The Queen is very unlikely to write either a memoir or an autobiography, so we have to depend on others to figure out her story and write it down. Because she is one of the most interesting people who ever lived, there is no shortage of people willing to do the job.
Sadly, I have nothing in common with Queen Elizabeth II. Few people do, not even Michelle Obama. Mrs. Obama is one of the most famous women in the world, but fame is not the same as history and noteworthiness is not the same as greatness.
*****
The Queen doesn't talk about her feelings. Michelle Obama does, and so do I, though I wish I didn't. I wish I could claim to be a person who sets aside her own personal feelings and just gets on with things. Of course, then I wouldn't have a blog, would I? Queen Elizabeth II has biographers and royal secretaries and Hello magazine writers; and there's plenty of documentation about what she does and where she goes and what she says, but almost none at all about how or what she feels. She seems to like it that way.
*****
2019: Not a good year for QEII. Lots of analysts are comparing it to her famous "Annus Horribilis" of 1992. Given the Royal Family's many failures to live up to the high standards that it has established for itself, it's easy to wonder why people (like me) continue to love and admire Her Majesty, and to believe in her commitment to a lifetime of service to others. Because no matter how many people serve her in whatever capacity from cleaning the royal residences to caring for the royal horses to managing her correspondence and her schedule and her wardrobe, there's no doubt that she also has served, sometimes at great personal cost.
A First Lady, like Michelle Obama (even like poor Melania Trump) also serves, whether she wants to or not. Unlike the Queen, though, an American First Lady always has an out. Her husband will either lose his re-election bid (hope springs eternal, but I'm afraid that we're in for a second term with Melania and her husband) or his second term will end and he'll begin his Constitutionally mandated retirement, bringing his wife with him. They're ladies in waiting, biding their time until this temporary state ends and they can resume their regular, normal lives; or whatever passes for regular and normal once you have lifetime Secret Service protection. Like Queen Elizabeth, Michelle Obama would have preferred a private life, but she rose to the occasion with admirable aplomb, served her fellow Americans for eight years, and then moved on. She was the 11th woman to fulfill that role during Queen Elizabeth's monarchy, now the longest in English history, and Her Majesty keeps on keeping on. God save the Queen.
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