Former Forever First Lady. Style Icon. Mother. Barack Obama's Wife. Author. Michelle Obama is a lot of things, and with the release of her new memoir Becoming, the multi-hyphenate will soon add "New York Times Bestseller" to her lengthy resume. Becoming sold 750,000 copies on its first day and, according to The Associated Press, raked in more than 1.4 million copies in its first week.
Released on November 13, Michelle Obama's Becoming has become one of the fastest-selling memoirs of 2018, outselling memoirs like Hillary Clinton's latest What Happened (300,000 first-week sales) and Bob Woodward's White House tell-all Fear: Trump in the White House, which sold 1.1 million copies during its first week in September. Becoming is also rumored to have outsold Donald Trump's 1987 memoir The Art of the Deal.
Crown Publishing revealed to The Associated Press that Becoming currently holds the No. 1 spot for adult non-fiction in Germany, France, Denmark, Holland, Spain, and more. Just days after its release, Barnes and Noble announced that Becoming had the best debut of any book released in 2018 since Harper Lee's 2015 novel Go Set a Watchman.
“We knew Becoming was going to be one of the biggest books of the year, but it has now officially had the best first week of sales of any book in 2018, and is among the fastest sellers in Barnes & Noble history,” said Liz Harwell, senior director of merchandising, trade books at Barnes & Noble. “This is definitely the must-have book of the holiday season.”
Obama is currently bringing her book on tour, hitting major cities across the states from her hometown Chicago to Brooklyn, NY, Washington, D.C, Philadelphia, PA, and more. At her latest stop in Washington, D.C, Barack Obama surprised his wife onstage and opened up about the summer he finally met her.
"The thing that I remember during that summer as we became friends, before she finally relented to a date, was she was one of a kind," he said. "I hadn't met somebody who was that strong and that honest—somebody who I just felt was a rock, [she] was somebody who I knew at that point I would always be able to count on, and someone who that if she was the mother of my children I knew my children would turn out extraordinary."
Nerisha is the Beauty Commerce Editor at ELLE.com, covering all things beauty. She has a penchant for sneakers and nude lip glosses, and spends way too much time re-watching ’90s sitcoms.
