in the New York Times, accompanied by a photo of Barack, smiling in a scarf and winter coat.
My boyfriend, in other words, was a big deal. He could have landed any number of fat-salaried law firm jobs at that point, but instead he was thinking about practicing civil rights law once he got his degree, even if it would then take twice as long to pay off his student loans. Practically everyone he knew was urging him to follow the lead of many previous Review editors and apply for what would be a shoo-in clerkship with the Supreme Court. But Barack wasn’t interested. He wanted to live in Chicago. He had ideas for writing a book about race in America and planned, he said, to find work that aligned with his values, which most likely meant he wouldn’t end up in corporate law. He steered himself with a certainty I found astounding.
All this inborn confidence was admirable, of course, but honestly, try living with it. For me, coexisting with Barack’s strong sense of purpose—sleeping in the same bed with it, sitting at the breakfast table with it—was something to which I had to adjust, not because he flaunted it, exactly, but because it was so alive. In the presence of his certainty, his notion that he could make some sort of difference in the world, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit lost by comparison. His sense of purpose seemed like an unwitting challenge to my own.
Hence the journal. On the very first page, in careful handwriting, I spelled out my reasons for starting it:
One, I feel very confused about where I want my life to go. What kind of person do I want to be? How do I want to contribute to the world?
Two, I am getting very serious in my relationship with Barack and I feel that I need to get a better handle on myself.
This little flowered book has now survived a couple of decades and multiple moves. It sat on a shelf in my dressing room at the White House for eight years, until very recently, when I pulled it out from a box in my new home to try to reacquaint myself with who I’d been as a young lawyer. I read those lines today and see exactly what I was trying to tell myself—what a no-nonsense female mentor might have said to me directly. Really, it was simple: The first thing was that I hated being a lawyer. I wasn’t suited to the work. I felt empty doing it, even if I was plenty good at it. This was a distressing thing to admit, given how hard I’d worked and how in debt I was. In my blinding drive to excel, in my need to do things perfectly, I’d missed the signs and taken the wrong road.
The second was that I was deeply, delightfully in love with a guy whose forceful intellect and ambition could possibly end up swallowing mine. I saw it coming already, like a barreling wave with a mighty undertow. I wasn’t going to get out of its path—I was too committed to Barack by then, too in love—but I did need to quickly anchor myself on two feet.
This meant finding a new profession, and what shook me most was that I had no concrete ideas about what I wanted to do. Somehow, in all my years of schooling, I hadn’t managed to think through my own passions and how they might match up with work I found meaningful. As a young person, I’d explored exactly nothing. Barack’s maturity, I realized, came in part from the years he’d logged as a community organizer and even, prior to that, a decidedly unfulfilling year he’d spent as a researcher at a Manhattan business consulting firm immediately after college. He’d tried out some things, gotten to know all sorts of people, and learned his own priorities along the way. I, meanwhile, had been so afraid of floundering, so eager for respectability and a way to pay the bills, that I’d marched myself unthinkingly into the law.
In the span of a year, I’d gained Barack and lost Suzanne, and the power of those two things together had left me spinning. Suzanne’s sudden death had awakened me to the idea that I wanted more joy and meaning in my life. I couldn’t continue to live with my own complacency. I both credited and blamed Barack