Opinion | The Comeback of the Century - The New York Times

So, even with a president who is ahistoric, borderline literate and would fail a sixth-grade reading comprehension test, something wonderful and unexpected is happening in the language arts. When the dominant culture goes low, the saviors of our senses go high. Which brings us to Michelle Obama. You can make a case that we owe a big part of the renaissance of the written word in recent months to her memoir, Becoming. In the first 15 days after publication last year, it sold enough copies to become the best-selling book in the United States for all of 2018. By the end of March of this year, it had sold 10 million copies and was on pace to become the best-selling memoir ever written in this country.

I was late to her book, having my doubts about platitudinous, focus-group-neutered memoirs by political personalities. As it turned out, she's a luminous, observant, self-aware writer, even if she had some help from a team of ghostwriters.