Summary

In Chapter 1, Obama provides details about her childhood. Obama explains that, when she was growing up, her mother, father, brother Craig, and she lived in an apartment above her great aunt Robbie. The home was a two-story house on Euclid Avenue on the South Side of Chicago, but had been converted into two apartments: the Robinson family lived upstairs and Robbie and her husband Terry lived downstairs, and they all shared an indoor stairwell. Craig is about two years older than Obama, and they shared their bedroom in the small upstairs apartment. Towards the end of the chapter, Obama reveals that her father had multiple sclerosis.

Obama describes her great aunt Robbie’s piano lessons as an omnipresent feature of her childhood. From her bedroom, she could hear “the plink plink plink of students sitting downstairs at [her] great-aunt Robbie’s...