Michelle Obama has officially begun her 12-stop tour to promote her new book, ‘Becoming,’ by sitting for a conversation with Oprah Winfrey at the home arena of the Chicago Bulls.
The crowd of 14,000 roared as the former first lady stepped onto a stage late Tuesday at the sold-out United Center. The event felt part music concert, part talk show and part political rally.
At the start, she described the day she and her family left the White House and got on a plane.
She said she cried for 30 minutes from relief after ‘eight years trying to do everything perfectly.’
Her other stops include Los Angeles, Detroit and Paris.
Her just-released memoir is already a best-seller. It topped Amazon.com’s best-seller list throughout the weekend.
Winfrey on Monday told The Associated Press in a statement that she had selected ‘Becoming’ for her book club.
She said: ‘This book is everything you wanted to know and so much you didn’t even know you wanted to know. I believe it’s going to spark within you the desire to think about your own becoming.
‘It’s so well-written I can hear her voice; I can hear her expressions; I can feel her emotion. What she allows us to see is how she was able to discover, define and then refine her voice.’
In ‘Becoming,’ Obama shares such deeply personal revelations as suffering a miscarriage and sharply criticizes President Donald Trump for promoting the false ‘birther’ rumor that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen.