Barack Obama Can’t Stop Trashing His Wife’s Writing Ability

Trump predecessor may divide long-awaited presidential memoir into two volumes because his literary skills are that good.

Former president Barack Obama has been "working" on his third memoir for several years. In that time, his wife, nutrition extremist Michelle Obama, has authored and published her own internationally best-selling memoir, Becoming.

For whatever reason, Barack appears unable to tolerate his wife's literary success. He has expressed an almost pathological level of annoyance at Michelle's ability to complete a memoir in under two years. It was a sore subject in 2019, when the Atlantic published a (sort of) preview of Obama's forthcoming tome, but with few details beyond the fact that the former president was struggling to keep it under 1,000 pages.

I remember doing a paper for a supervisor who wanted 500 words on a subject. I started writing and didn’t realize I had written about 600 words before even getting a good head of steam up.

I really need to get a new job.

“I remember doing a paper for a supervisor who wanted 500 words on a subject. I started writing and didn’t realize I had written about 600 words before even getting a good head of steam up.”

LOL. Now you’ve set me off on an Old Law School Story (Don’t worry, no obscenity or even grossness, unlike Old Fraternity Stories). In freshman year we had a legal writing course where we wrote moot court briefs and argued an appellate case. Our briefs were limited to ten pages. When I finished mine I discovered it was about 10.5 pages and couldn’t be easily rewritten down to the proper size.

Then I had an inspiration. I’d typed my brief using a typewriter that typed ten characters per inch. The rule was ten pages, but didn’t specify the number of characters per inch. So, I sat down, remembered my old high school algebra, calculated how many pages I’d come up with at 12 characters per inch, and discovered the brief would make the 10 page minimum if typed at 12 characters per inch. Then I borrowed a 12 character per inch typewriter from a fraternity brother, typed my final version of the brief with that machine, and made the page limitation. I’ve always been proud of that because I demonstrated a valuable talent for lawyer—finding a good loophole.

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