The Obamas are not going away anytime soon, no matter President Donald Trump and his allies’ most desperate hopes that they’d just retreat from the public spotlight. Now, it’s come out that former First Lady Michelle Obama is planning a companion book to follow-up on her hit memoir Becoming, which sold over 10 million copies and counting and was suggested at one point to be the best-selling autobiography in history. The new work will be called Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice, building off the success of Becoming itself as exemplified by the sky-high sales and multiple legs of a world speaking tour Michelle went on to promote the work.
According to publisher Penguin Random House, the new companion volume will “more than 150 inspiring questions and quotes that resonate with key themes in Mrs. Obama’s memoir and that are designed to help readers reflect on their personal and family history, their goals, challenges, and dreams, what moves them and brings them hope, and what future they imagine for themselves and their community.”
The quotes mirror the format of that book tour Michelle has gone on, where she’s been joined by a dizzying array of notable cultural figures. Coming out November 19, the sort-of workbook will also feature an introduction from the former First Lady, in which she writes about the process of developing her initial memoir:
‘The experience left me asking myself, ‘Why didn’t I journal more?’ The answer, like for so many of you, I’m sure, was that I simply got busy… I didn’t journal much because I talked myself out of it… The idea being that once you put pen to paper, your thoughts have extra weight and meaning. What I recognize now, though, is far more simple: We don’t have to remember everything. But everything we remember has value.’
Besides Becoming, former President Barack Obama himself also has been rumored to have a memoir on the horizon — and if Michelle’s book is any indication, his book will do extremely well. The two of them together also signed a deal with Netflix to executive produce a number of different forms of content, including a documentary that’s now come out chronicling the struggles of a Midwestern factory.
Of course, their continued cultural contributions are far from the only spark that’s kept them in the spotlight in the time since they’ve left government.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly lambasted them for supposedly failing in what at this point is apparently essentially every way imaginable. Most recently, Trump has zeroed in on Obama’s former second-in-command Joe Biden, who Trump has pushed foreign governments including Ukraine and China to investigate. That brazen attempt at garnering foreign election interference has earned Trump an ongoing formal impeachment inquiry from House Democrats.
The Obamas have been picky with the occasions on which they’ve explicitly weighed in on the state of affairs following the end of their time in government, but when the Democratic Party eventually comes up with a nominee for the 2020 presidential race, they’ll likely weigh in at that point.
Featured Image via screenshot
