Summary

Obama opens “Becoming Us” by sharing the rush of emotion she felt for Barack in the month after their first kiss. She describes Barack’s cramped apartment and the nights they slept there, his incessant reading, and the late hours he kept. He met her family, and she attended community organizing meetings with him in Roseland. Before Barack returned to Harvard for the school year, he told Obama he loved her. Obama occasionally traveled to Cambridge as a recruiter for Sidley & Austin, which allowed her to see Barack. They traveled to Honolulu together at Christmas so that she could meet his family.

In the fall of 1989, Obama’s good college friend Suzanne Alele called to tell her that she has “an aggressive form of lymphoma” (127). Obama continued working her job, and only realized the urgency with which she needed to visit...