Barack Obama covers the January issue of InStyle to promote his presidential memoir, A Promised Land. Just from where I sit, Michelle Obama’s book tour was managed a lot better than her husband’s. Michelle had a badass book rollout with a media blitz, she blanketed the media for a solid month, and she went on an international tour which included speeches and on-stage interviews. So far, Barry has just given us a few depressed interviews. But this InStyle cover is inspired! I’m glad that Obama is actively seeking to sell his book to younger women/InStyle readers. He speaks about his wife and two daughters, and then InStyle excerpts part of his book where he writes about his mother, who still seems to inspire awe in him.

The most badass thing about Michelle, Malia, and Sasha? They all have multiple badass qualities. I think people know Michelle well enough to know how amazing she can be as a public speaker. They probably are less aware of what it’s like to work out with Michelle when she’s really in her groove. And sometimes that includes her boxing. You don’t want to get in the way when she’s working on a bag — including some kicks. There’s force there.

On Sasha: “Sasha is, as Malia describes it, completely confident about her own take on the world and is not cowed or intimidated — and never has been — by anybody’s titles, anybody’s credentials. If she thinks something’s wrong or right, she will say so. When she was 4, 5, 6 years old, once she made a decision, she would dig in and couldn’t be steered off it. I write about it in the book, how we were trying to get her to taste caviar when we were visiting Russia. She was like, “Mnn-nnh. No. Sorry. That looks slimy. It’s nasty. I’m not going to do it — even if I’ve got to give up dessert.” And that part of her character has always been there.

On Malia: “And Malia, she is just buoyant. She’s somebody who enjoys people, enjoys life, and enjoys conversation. She’s never bored, which is a badass quality that can take you places.

His mother: My mother, Ann Dunham, was different, full of strong opinions. My grandparents’ only child, she rebelled against convention in high school — reading beatnik poets and French existentialists, joyriding with a friend to San Francisco for days without telling anyone. As a kid, I’d hear from her about civil rights marches, and why the Vietnam War was a misguided disaster; about the women’s movement (yes on equal pay, not as keen on not shaving her legs) and the War on Poverty. When we moved to Indonesia to live with my stepfather, she made sure to explain the sins of government corruption (“It’s just stealing, Barry”), even if everyone appeared to be doing it. Later, during the summer I turned twelve, when we went on a month-long family vacation traveling across the United States, she insisted we watch the Watergate hearings every night, providing her own running commentary (“What do you expect from a McCarthyite?”).

But his mother didn’t get involved in campaigns: For my mother, the world was full of opportunities for moral instruction. But I never knew her to get involved in a political campaign. Like my grandparents, she was suspicious of platforms, doctrines, absolutes, preferring to express her values on a smaller canvas. “The world is complicated, Bar. That’s why it’s interesting.” Dismayed by the war in Southeast Asia, she’d end up spending most of her life there, absorbing the language and culture, setting up micro-lending programs for people in poverty long before micro-credit became trendy in international development. Appalled by racism, she would marry outside her race not once but twice, and go on to lavish what seemed like an inexhaustible love on her two brown children. Incensed by societal constraints put upon women, she’d divorce both men when they proved overbearing or disappointing, carving out a career of her own choosing, raising her kids according to her own standards of decency, and pretty much doing whatever she damn well pleased.

[From InStyle]

Throughout his presidency, I always felt like Obama still hadn’t really processed his mother’s passing in 1995. It was almost like it was still too raw, too untouchable for him even more than a decade later. He grieved for the father he barely knew, he was able to process his beloved grandmother’s passing (she passed on the eve of the 2008 election), but his mom informed so much of who he was and is. Anyway, now I want to cry and think about how the bonds he’s formed with women throughout his life were the ones to make him who he is.

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Cover & IG courtesy of InStyle.