She had at first felt “overwhelmed by the pace, unworthy of the glamour, anxious about our children and uncertain about my purpose,” she writes. She sought apolitical endeavors, such as cultivating the White House vegetable garden (which originally met resistance from those who manage the White House grounds), and promoting healthy nutrition and exercise for children. She tried to steer clear of West Wing matters, which she saw as her husband’s domain, though it often held sway over hers. The president’s advisers could be so “overly fretful” about her appearance that her staff felt the need to consult with the West Wing when she decided she wanted bangs in her hair.

In the second term, her daughters were passing into adolescence and she was feeling the generational dissonance awaiting all parents, no matter their station. “Don’t you want to come downstairs tonight and hear Paul McCartney?” she asked them. “Mom, please. No,” was the response. When Malia did in fact go with a date to the prom, her parents were unusually calm. After all, they knew that a Secret Service detail “would basically ride the boy’s bumper” there and back and “remain on quiet duty throughout.”

As the book turned to the Obamas’ final years at the White House, I looked forward to Michelle’s insights on one of the biggest running stories of her husband’s second term — that of the high-profile killings of African-American men, women and boys at the hands of the police, often caught on video, and which ignited the Black Lives Matter movement. But it became clear that, while she makes mention of these things, she has chosen to focus on events that touched her personally, such as the 2013 shooting of Hadiya Pendleton, a 15-year-old high school student from Michelle’s hometown.

Throughout their time in the White House, she writes, as the opposition party seemed “devoted to Barack’s failure above all else,” she often felt crushed and infuriated: “I felt emotions that perhaps Barack couldn’t afford to feel.” Then, in June 2015, after a white supremacist killed nine black parishioners at a historic church in Charleston, she watched her husband lead mourners in a poignant rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Voices swelling around her in response to yet another tragedy, she thought about the paradox of their ascension: “For more than six years now, Barack and I had lived with the awareness that we ourselves were a provocation.”

It was during the presidential campaign of 2016 that she famously said, “When they go low, we go high.” But for the first time in years, neither she nor her husband had a role to play on election night: “The moment ahead wasn’t ours. It was merely ours to witness.” The numbers rolling in were looking “kind of strange,” her husband told her. She turned in early, not ready to face what that meant. That January, sitting on the inaugural stage at the swearing-in of her husband’s successor, she looked out into the crowd whose composition was so different from those who had gathered for her husband. She looked at the incoming president and registered the chasm in ideals. “I stopped even trying to smile,” she writes. Afterward, the helicopter that would take them from the White House lifted off, and the toll of living so long in fear of any misstep finally hit her.

“When I got on the plane, I think I sobbed for 30 minutes,” she said in a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey. “I think it was just the release of eight years of trying to do everything perfectly. I said to Barack, ‘That was so hard, what we just did, that was so hard.’” There can be few African-Americans, or other marginalized people, who would not nod in recognition at some aspect of her story, including her response to the extreme scrutiny she has faced. But just as important, her family’s devotion and work ethic, the steadfastness and sacrifice, are evidence of how much we all have in common if we could but see it. To this day, when people speak to her mother, Marian Robinson, about the success of her children, coming out of the South Side of Chicago as they did, she is quick to correct them. “They’re not special at all,” Robinson says. “The South Side is filled with kids like that.” And, one might add, so is America.