Becoming, Belonging

Two women, two memoirs, two very different journeys towards finding a place in the world.

In Becoming, Michelle Obama writes about making a self in a society that repeatedly tried to define her. In Belonging: A Journey of Love, Sonia Gandhi looks back at what it took for a woman born in Italy to make India her home. The titles may point to different destinations, but together they raise a question: what does it take to become someone, and to belong somewhere?

A verb is a promise about time. Becoming suggests a journey still in progress; belonging suggests an arrival, but one that comes with its own history and cost. Michelle Obama and Sonia Gandhi chose these words to hold their lives, and the difference between them reveals much about the worlds they had to navigate.

A bungalow on the South Side

Michelle Obama's story begins in a Chicago bungalow, in an upstairs apartment, in a neighbourhood the rest of America rarely looked at twice. Her parents had little money and large expectations. The world beyond the front door had its own ideas about how far a Black girl from the South Side could go, and she recalls a school counsellor who doubted she belonged at Princeton.

She went anyway, then to Harvard Law, and onward into a career that eventually put her in the White House as the first Black First Lady of the United States. Becoming does not tell this as a fairy tale of arrival. It is organised around the idea that identity is a practice rather than a prize, and its three movements ("me," "us," "more") are less chapters than stages of a self being revised in public.

A student in Cambridge

Sonia Gandhi's story begins four thousand miles and a world away. Belonging: A Journey of Love opens in Cambridge in 1965, where Sonia Maino, a nineteen-year-old language student from a village in post-war Italy, meets Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru and son of Indira Gandhi, and falls in love at first sight.

Nothing about what followed was ordinary. She moved to India, entered the household of a prime minister, and spent decades learning a country that was at first foreign to her and later foreign about her. Then came the losses: Indira Gandhi assassinated in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi murdered in 1991. The memoir describes how grief pulled her toward a political life she had long resisted. When the prime minister's office was within reach in 2004, she chose to decline it. India, in her words, is "the beautiful country of my belonging."

Rooms not built for them

Set the two lives next to each other and the first thing that appears is a shared posture: that of the person who enters a room and understands, within seconds, that it was not built with her in mind.

For Michelle Obama, that room was shaped by America's long habit of deciding what Black women could and could not be. For Sonia Gandhi, it was shaped by a country's wariness of a daughter-in-law born elsewhere. Neither woman could control how she was read. Each could only decide how to read herself, and then write it down.

Both also married into history. A future president on one side, a political heir on the other: each husband's life became public property, and each wife faced the delicate task of staying whole inside someone else's story. In both memoirs, a private love story is carried along by a national one.

Facing forward, looking back

The titles, though, point in opposite directions. Becoming faces forward. It is the book of a woman asking who she is still growing into, written with the freedom of someone who had stepped out of public office and could afford to be expansive. Its obstacle was a society that had to be persuaded she deserved space.

Belonging looks back. It is the book of a woman asking what it took to be accepted, and who paid for it. Its obstacle was a country that had to be persuaded she was its own. Gandhi, long known for guarding her privacy, speaks here at length for the first time, and that candour is much of what gives the book its weight. Even its release carried a trace of the politics it describes: after a dispute with its first intended Indian publisher, HarperCollins India brought the book out on 10 November.

One memoir is about claiming a seat at the table. The other is about being welcomed into a home.

One question, asked twice

Read together, the two books stop looking like rivals and start looking like halves of a single question. To become is to grow into who you are. To belong is to be accepted as part of where you are. Michelle Obama shows what becoming demands when the world has already decided what you are. Sonia Gandhi shows what belonging demands when the world has every reason to call you a stranger.

The more either memoir is read, the harder it becomes to separate the two verbs. People become in order to belong, and they belong in order to keep becoming.

Note: Belonging reached bookshops only this week. This piece draws on the publisher's description and early reporting rather than a full critical reading of the text.