Michelle Obama, for a good part of her life, disliked politicians. In her memoir, “Becoming,” she writes that the antipathy dates back to her childhood in Chicago: “I had never been one to hold city hall in high regard.” Some of the reasons had to do with history and the way that the political system had “been used against black folks, as a means to keep us isolated and excluded.” But others were personal. “My father, who was a city employee most of his life, had essentially been conscripted into service as a Democratic precinct captain to even be considered for promotions at his job,” she writes. “He relished the social aspect of his precinct duties but had always been put off by city hall cronyism.” When she herself was conscripted into her husband’s first campaign for the Illinois State Senate, she resisted at first. Her arguments varied from discussion to discussion, but the fundamental reason, which stood “like a sequoia rooted in the ground,” was this: “I didn’t much appreciate politicians and therefore didn’t relish the idea of my husband becoming one.”

And she didn’t really see what he would gain. “Most of what I knew about state politics came from what I read in the newspaper, and none of it seemed especially good or productive,” she writes. “In general, I thought of lawmakers almost like armored tortoises, leather-skinned, slow moving, thick with self-interest.” The idea of Barack Obama winning an election was, in other words, not a wild, audacious aspiration but something that she believed would diminish him. Still, she said yes, for the even more deeply rooted reason that she loves him and trusts him: “If Barack believed he could do something in politics, who was I to get in his way?”

But that commitment, and the protectiveness that comes with it, also fed her skepticism. At the end of 1999, Barack, by then a state senator and a candidate in the Democratic primary for Illinois’s First Congressional District, missed a vote on a major crime bill when he stayed with their frighteningly ill baby daughter, Malia, in Hawaii, where the family was visiting Barack’s widowed grandmother. The result was “a political disaster”; the primary campaign “devolved into a series of low blows,” as his opponents made an issue of his absence, calling him selfish and worse. “Never before had I heard my husband’s character questioned like that,” she writes. “It hurt to think that a good decision—the right decision, as far as I was concerned—seemed to be costing him so much.” Bobby Rush, the Democratic incumbent in the First District, who is also African-American, told the Chicago Reader that Barack was “an educated fool” and an élitist. Rush won reëlection. (He’s still in Congress.) Politics, Michelle concluded, was a place, maybe the place, where “everything parents on the South Side often said they wanted for their kids” was treated as a liability—a basis for mocking and smears. “I was astonished to see how our leaders treated him only as a threat to their power, inciting mistrust by playing on backward, anti-intellectual ideas about race and class,” she writes. “It made me sick.”

Matters hadn’t improved by the time Barack decided to run for the Senate, in 2004. Instead, Michelle writes, “My distaste for politics was intensifying, less because of what went on in either Springfield or D.C. and more because five years into his tenure as state senator Barack’s overloaded schedule was starting to really grate on me.” Still, she writes that, once again, “I also couldn’t bring myself to stand in the way of his aspiration, that thing always tugging at him to try for more.” And her consent to the Senate run included a gamble with a big upside: “If he lost, he’d move on from politics altogether and find a different sort of job.”

He won, but in a way that can only have served to confirm her skepticism about the character of politicians. “Both the Democratic front-runner in the primary and the ensuing Republican nominee became embroiled in scandals involving their ex-wives,” is the way she puts it in the book. This is diplomatic. Michelle does not mention that the ex-wife of the Democrat alleged, in an affidavit seeking a protective order, that he had hit her at least once and, on another occasion, had “hung on the canopy bar of my bed, leered at me and stated, ‘Do you want to die? I am going to kill you.’ ” (He claimed to have hit her because she kicked him; she withdrew her request for the protective order when their divorce was settled.) The ex-wife of the Republican alleged that he had demanded that she accompany him to bondage-themed sex clubs and tried to get her to take part in the group activities there. (He offered a partial denial, which rejected the idea that she’d been pressured but acknowledged a visit to an “avant-garde nightclub.”)

Michelle decided to stay with their daughters in Chicago while Barack commuted to Washington; she also declined an invitation to join a high-powered D.C. wives’ club. But control of the situation—her ability to maintain the border between her life and the world of politics—began to slip out of her grasp. Even before Barack won the Senate seat, when he was just through the primaries, Senator John Kerry, who was then running for President, asked him to speak at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, in Boston—the appearance that gave him a national profile. “Must’ve been a good speech” became the line that Michelle repeated, “often and with irony,” every time someone—a journalist, a stranger, Oprah—came up to him in raptures in the following days. But, in truth, she was a bit rapturous, too, having learned that the staged spectacle of a convention can actually reveal the kind of truth that she had thought politics scorned. “That Barack was a good person with a big mind and a serious faith in democracy was no longer any sort of secret,” she writes.

She was already well on her way to agreeing to let him run for another, higher office. “Daddy, are you gonna try to be president?” Malia asks, having picked up the “whirlwind” around that question. “Don’t you think maybe you should be vice president or something first?” Michelle writes that, as a pragmatist, she agreed with her daughter. But perhaps her very skepticism about politics as a profession prepared her to make the leap: she never appears to have thought that campaign conference rooms or legislative back rooms were particularly good incubators of either talent or character. In a way, they were no place to learn to be President. “I said yes because I loved him and had faith in what he could do,” she writes. At the same time, “I didn’t really think he could win.”

Their time on the trail reminds her of what she doesn’t like about politics. Speaking, without a script, in Wisconsin, she says, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country. And not because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction, and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment.” What she was saying, in a full sense, was that, for the first time, she was really proud of politics. But politics lashed back: taken out of context, that first phrase (“those fourteen stupid words”) were used to caricature her as an “angry black woman” who hates her country. She likens the experience to being punched in the face.