Kiss and tell: Michelle memoir tells how she and Obama met

US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama kiss as they prepare to greet President-elect Donald Trump and his wife Melania on January 20, 2017. In her new memoir, Becoming, Michelle Obama not only talks about her public role and her family but also delves into her love life. PHOTO | JIM WATSON | AFP

What you need to know:

  • The book not only talks about her public and family life but also delves into her romantic relationships as a youngster.
  • In her gap year, she worked in a bookbindery, where she met another prospective boyfriend, David.
  • Once in Princeton, a new vista opened up for Michelle and, in time, she met another boyfriend, Kevin.

In her new memoir, Becoming, Michelle Obama not only talks about her public role and her family but also delves into her love life revealing, for instance, the first time she had a kiss as a teenager.

"I arranged my first kiss, in fact, over the phone," she writes.

"It was with a boy named Ronnell. Ronnell didn't go to my school or live in my immediate neighbourhood, but he sang in the Chicago Children's Choir."

At the time, Michelle would observe how other girls her age were changing due to the onset of adolescence and how the rush of hormones made her accompany her friends to watch boys play. To increase her chances of being noticed, she would often tag one of her popular friends along.

"Being around boys, I was slowly coming to realise, was fun," she writes in the book that comes out this week and for which she and her husband, former US President Barack Obama, were paid a joint advance fee of $65 million (Sh6.5 billion).

In her gap year, she worked in a bookbindery, where she met another prospective boyfriend, David.

And when it was time for her to join Princeton University, David and her father drove her all the way to the campus.

However, she says that even by then, she had made up her mind to move on.

"David was easy-going and also more of an adult than any boyfriend I'd had. He sat on the couch and watched ball games with my father. He joked around with Craig and made polite conversations with my mom... We fooled around and smoked pot in his car..."

MEETING OBAMA

Once in Princeton, a new vista opened up for Michelle and, in time, she met another boyfriend, Kevin, a football player but it did not work out.

He eventually became a doctor and married a college mate of Michelle's.

She, too, graduated with a law degree and joined a prestigious law firm in Chicago, Sidley & Austin, and that was where one of the senior partners asked her if she would be willing to mentor one of the young lawyers, known as summer associates, that the company was grooming.

"Of course you will," she writes. "You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes ... Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who's busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he's black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing β€” just the name, and it's an odd one."

And that is how she met Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan student.

Obama would later become the 44th US President before handing over power to Donald Trump.

Michelle has made it clear that there is no love lost between her and President Trump.