🎧
Memoir
Born a Crime
0 reviewsView →
Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.
Some memoirs justify audio; a few require it. Becoming is the second kind. Michelle Obama reads all nineteen hours herself, and the performance won the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album — not as a celebrity courtesy, but because hearing a former First Lady narrate her own doubts, in her own cadence, produces an intimacy the page cannot replicate.
Three movements: Becoming Me (the South Side of Chicago, a striving family, Princeton, corporate law), Becoming Us (Barack, marriage counselling candidly included, miscarriage and IVF discussed with unusual openness), and Becoming More (campaigns and the White House years, told from the family's side of the glass). The book's reputation for honesty rests on the middle section — few public figures at this level have written this plainly about the ordinary strains of a marriage — and on her ambivalence about politics itself, which she never pretends to have enjoyed.
Obama is a practiced public speaker, and it shows in her control — but the register here is softer than a podium voice, closer to a long conversation. She slows for grief, sharpens for the campaign-trail absurdities, and lets humor land dry. Nineteen hours is a commitment, yet the three-part structure breaks naturally into listening arcs, and her voice carries the stretch better than most professional narrators could, precisely because none of it is performed at a distance.
Memoir listeners first and foremost — this is a life story, not a policy book, and readers looking for political score-settling will not find it. It pairs unusually well with Educated and Born a Crime as studies in becoming yourself against your circumstances.
Well narrated? Definitively — a Grammy said so. The rare very long memoir that earns its length, and one of the strongest arguments in the catalog for choosing author-read audio over print.
Born a Crime for another author-performed memoir that transcends its print edition, or Educated for a very different story about education as escape velocity.
Yes — she reads the complete unabridged edition, and the performance won the 2020 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album. It is widely considered one of the defining author-read memoirs.
Less than most listeners expect. Politics is the setting of the final third, but the book is a personal memoir about family, identity, and ambition — and she is openly candid about her distaste for politics as a profession.
It is long, but the three-section structure creates natural arcs, and most listeners report the Chicago childhood chapters — the least famous material — as the most absorbing. At 1.25x it comfortably fits into two weeks of commutes.
You can hear Becoming free with an Audible trial. (Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.)
No approved reviews yet. Be the first to write one.
