Mr Robinson: Michelle is still her father's daughter

By Edwidge Danticat

Fraser Robinson III was a Chicago water-department employee who volunteered to knock on doors – with young Michelle tagging along – to encourage his neighbours to vote. That he suffered from multiple sclerosis made every extra effort that much more heroic. He needed his daughter as much as she needed him, leading to a kind of symbiotic bond I too experienced when my father spent nearly a year dying from a crippling lung disease.

From both the strength and vulnerability of adored fathers, one cannot help but learn resilience and empathy and a reluctance to complain. After her father died, Michelle Obama left a high-powered job as an intellectual-property lawyer. "I am constantly trying to make sure that I am making him proud," she said. "What would my father think of the choices that I've made, how I've lived my life, what careers I chose, what man I married?"

She certainly sought a man like her father. "That was the kind of guy my sister was looking for,'' Craig Robinson has said. "We used to joke as a family, 'She'll never find a guy like that, because they don't exist anymore.'''

A dress is a dress is a dress:
the fashion question

By Rivka Galchen

My mother believes our new First Lady should wear shorter skirts. A nice pair of legs is a sight to be seen. We have many conversations about this, and very few about veterans' affairs, and we feel kind of bad about this, but not too bad. Our friends are also having conversations of this type. As are our friends' friends, and our friends' friends' friends. Talking about Michelle's clothes now feels kind of like talking about the weather or the current price of crude oil; we all seem to agree that our new First Lady's hemline isn't just a hemline. And, furthermore, that the whole hemline conversation, compared to a sleeve-or-no-sleeve conversation, is child's play.

How should our new First Lady's fashion relate, my mother and I wonder, to Serena Williams in her not-exactly-a-tennis-skirt skirts, or Jackie O in her A-line dresses, or Phylicia Rashad in whatever it was she used to wear on The Cosby Show? (And there we find ourselves stumbling again on whether we feel bad, on account of these being the first comparisons that come to mind.)

When our new First Lady wears a white, sparkling, fluffy one-strapped ball gown designed by the 26-year-old Taiwanese-American Jason Wu, does this mean she is Cinderella? Our nation's bride? Unfairly biased against black designers? Dismissive of older Americans? Promoting female upper-body strength?

It seems possible that, given the variables of sleeves and hemlines and fabrics and price tags and the nationality/ skin tone/ gender/ age of our new First Lady's favoured designers – that given all this, and then depending on the algorithm deployed by particular observers to "solve" for the "meaning" of any one outfit, our new First Lady can, all at once, be transmitting a message of love, hate, irresponsible socialist tendencies, evidence that the market eats everything, and the insufficiently acknowledged truth that if we believe in the goodness of the American people, anything can be ours.

It's tempting just to say that since each fashion choice can mean everything, it means nothing. And it's amazing, once you give yourself this out, how many meanings can comfortably fit into nothing! Since, say, every fabric choice can be a comment on all fabrics – a comment on, in fact, the fabric of America itself – in the final analysis, there is no comment at all. Which makes Michelle's hemline her hemline. Her sleeveless dress her sleeveless dress. Her legs… a sight to be seen. It's simpler that way, my mother and I think. We feel not that bad. If not that honest, either.

Kitchen cabinetry: the edible is

political

By Susan Burton

Michelle Obama is a locavore. Or at least she's learning to be. Before her first state dinner, she tried to summarise her culinary credo for reporters, culinary students, and all the foodies watching via C-Span's website: "That's the important thing about natural," she starts. "Or" – she is momentarily confused – "local", and then she makes a point about calories, describing a cream-of-broccoli soup that was good even without the cream. But the stumble helps. The stumble prevents her from being preachy. When it comes to eating, she is not sanctimonious (Eleanor Roosevelt) or haute (Jackie Kennedy) or anorexic (Nancy Reagan). She seems to actually enjoy food. And if she's discovered a new way of eating, who cares what you call it? Sometimes she says "clean food", which seems symbolic of the purity we ascribe to the Obamas themselves.

Not long ago it would have been demeaning to tie an apron around the First Lady's waist. But the kitchen is now a source of power. It's become a place where we bake policy, not just cookies. (If Hillary had known this was going to happen, would she have been more comfortable there?) These days, the politics of food – sustainable farming, food safety, organic standards, childhood obesity – all rest on this countertop.

The hero's foil: normalising the president

By David Samuels

Gifted with the security that her parents gave her in childhood, Michelle Obama seems to have been both thrilled and discomfited by her husband's radical self-invention and his desire to stand out from the crowd. His character was shaped in a quiet but tense struggle with his mixed parentage and the fact that both his parents abandoned him for other pursuits. Michelle will always remain the queen of a precious square block of middle-class black Chicago where her parents loved her and her brother was a basketball star.

There are clear limits to Michelle's ambition. She went to excellent schools, got decent grades, stayed away from too much intellectual heavy lifting, and held a series of practical, modestly salaried jobs while accommodating her husband's wilder dreams and raising two lovely daughters. In this, she is a more practical role model for young women than Hillary Clinton, blending her calculations about family and career with an expectation of normal personal happiness. Now her mother is coming to live in the White House.

The fact that Barack remains so publicly in thrall to her is a tribute to the Obamas' shared genius for putting other people at their ease. Barack Obama alone would make us uncomfortable. Michelle neutralises our response to her husband's existential estrangement by sharing our discomfort while still being in love with him. She found his literary and political ambitions wildly impractical. She tested him before she married him, made fun of his weird-sounding name, tried to make him go to bed on time, and worried that he didn't get a normal job. She convinced her husband, whose mastery of political calculation extends to seven or 10 extra dimensions, that she was the ultimate catch.

The trick of attributing superhuman characteristics to a protagonist and then making him vulnerable through love is a literary trick as old as the Greeks. F Scott Fitzgerald would have loved the Obamas, though one suspects that, if she'd been a character in The Great Gatsby, he would have made her into a black Jordan Baker type, mysterious and cool with a borderline lesbian vibe. Love is the great equaliser, and it makes the reader less resentful of a supremely gifted hero.

It takes a grandma: Michelle's
old-school parenting

By Katie Roiphe

One of the most appealing things about Michelle Obama is her closeness to her mother. Some people might think it is strange or even pathological to bring your mother with you to the White House. Certainly, no one has done it since the Trumans, and no one at all seems to have done it as joyfully and naturally as the Obamas.

While many modern women have prickly or distant relations with their mothers, Michelle reportedly begged her mother to come with the family to Washington. Then she fielded out the manipulation to the most skillful and powerful manipulators, the 10-and-unders, saying, "All they have to do is look at her with sad eyes and she's done for." Mrs Robinson responded the way any self-respecting American grandmother would: I don't want to intrude. But isn't it a sign of an extremely healthy mother-daughter relationship that she did anyway?

Mrs Robinson's subtle subversion of our fashionable child-rearing trends is excellent: that she lets the kids eat inorganic food, that she lets them stay up past bedtime. The fact that Michelle, who seems dauntingly organised, even a tiny bit controlling, condones and even invites this grandmotherly pampering shows that she is a better and more resourceful mother than one might have thought. Most of today's parents are too enraptured or blinkered by current vogues in child-rearing to see the wisdom of the old, freer way of doing things.

It's a supremely elegant solution to the dilemma of the two-career family. Think how heavenly it must be to have built-in babysitting by someone who loves your child as much as you do. Grandmothers everywhere should beware. Their quiet years – playing Scrabble, reading books, drinking tequila sunrises – are distinctly imperiled.

About face: Michelle's expression as a barometer of the administration

By Andrew Holleran

The traditional First Lady facial expression is a parody of High Genteel: an eerie combination of warmth, graciousness and reserve. Not this time. What strikes one about Michelle Obama's expression in her first months in the White House is the energy, the gusto, the joy of possession. Even in a black-and-white Washington Post photo of the Obamas in the president's box at the Kennedy Centre watching the Alvin Ailey dance company, the dull ink could not dim the impression that they are having the time of their lives. Waving to the audience, the First Couple project a radiance, a high wattage. How else to describe Michelle's expression? Journalism favours the smile, of course, and hers is so bright, so blazing, she reminds you of Doris Day. (There's something strangely '50s about the Obamas in many ways.) It's a toothy smile, a genuine grin.

There is no evidence that Jackie Kennedy, the Mona Lisa of them all, even had teeth. Or Laura Bush, whose smile was so secretive she seemed to be stoned – that lacquered expression that gave nothing away. With Michelle, there is no dissimulation; when she's not smiling, she can look stark. (When she's not smiling, your attention shifts to her eyes, which can look alarmed, even bleak.)

That's why her face is going to be one of the seismographs of this administration. To have, after Laura Bush's perfectly calibrated refusal to betray the slightest thought or feeling, and Hillary Clinton's inability to convince us that any of her expressions was unpremeditated, a First Lady whose face is full of feeling is unsettling. Till now it's been the president's visage we watch change during his term in office – in the direction of fatigue and worry. This time it's going to be more interesting to watch hers evolve; to see if, four years down the road, she has learned to acquire a mask.