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EXCLUSIVE: Michelle Obama Reads From Her Forthcoming Memoir 'Becoming'

NPR host Audie Cornish interviews former first lady Michelle Obama about her memoir <em>Becoming</em> in Chicago, Ill., Nov. 2.
Chuck Kennedy for NPR
NPR host Audie Cornish interviews former first lady Michelle Obama about her memoir Becoming in Chicago, Ill., Nov. 2.

Michelle Obama's new memoir Becoming,about her life from childhood through the White House years, comes out Tuesday. NPR was provided an exclusive listen Monday to two sections of the audio book, read by Obama herself.

In the first, Obama focuses on her impressions of Princeton, being a minority there, and college life. "The hope was that all of us would mingle in heterogeneous harmony," she says of the university's vision for the various races. But, she says, the burden was placed on the minority students.

In the second excerpt, Obama reads about the period of time when her husband, former president Barack Obama, was an Illinois senator — and they were trying to start a family. "I treated it like a mission," she says. "No matter how hard we tried, we couldn't seem to come up with a pregnancy." She had a miscarriage and, later, the couple conceived their two daughters through IVF treatments.

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Meghan Collins Sullivan
Meghan Collins Sullivan is a senior editor on the Arts & Culture Desk, overseeing non-fiction books coverage at NPR. She has worked at NPR over the last 13 years in various capacities, including as the supervising editor for NPR.org – managing a team of online producers and reporters and editing multi-platform news coverage. She was also lead editor for the 13.7: Cosmos and Culture blog, written by five scientists on topics related to the intersection of science and culture.