She has provided interviews, love letters, and personal diaries written during her days as Obama’s girlfriend for a new book, which focuses not only on Genevieve Cook, but also on another woman named Alex McNear of Occidental College who was his first girlfriend. The book is called “Barack Obama: The Story,” which was written by David Maraniss, a well-respected journalist for the Washington Post newspaper. Although Alex McNear got to him first, it was Genevieve Cook who was his first true love, known in his autobiography as the “New York girlfriend.” They dated for over a year and actually lived together for a short time in their love nest, an apartment in New York City. The entire span of their relationship lasted from January 1983 until May 1985. Genevieve provided juicy personal details to the author whose publisher Simon & Schuster released some excerpts which were published in Vanity Fair in order to gin up interest in the work. She was a sexually active open-minded woman who wrote at the time that she enjoyed Obama’s “sexual warmth” and how much she enjoyed seeing him shirtless. One quote from Miss Cook’s diary relates their intimate bedroom encounters this way: “I open the door, that Barack keeps closed, to his room, and enter into a warm, private space pervaded by a mixture of smells that so strongly speak of his presence, his liveliness, his habits—running sweat, Brut spray deodorant, smoking, eating raisins, sleeping, breathing.” The poetic commas are all her’s by the way.
Interested yet? You can read more here.