Barack Obama's Third Autobiography: I Read Marx and Post-Modernists So I Could Chat Up "the Ethereal Bisexual Who Wore Mostly Black" on My Dorm Floor

@WhitlockJason

Jeff Goldberg writing abt Obama in The Atlantic: " A Promised Land is an unusual presidential memoir in many ways...unusually modern (this is the first presidential memoir, I believe, to use the term ethereal bisexual to describe an unrequited love interest)."

Here Obama's third autobiography describes his lifelong love affair with books, a love affair that was never actually evident in his life.

He did like filling out his brackets, though!

The Obama childhood is familiar territory by now (this is his third autobiographical work) and this time he says little about his four formative years in Indonesia, taking up the story on his return to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents. There are interesting reflections on the pivot point from easygoing teenage Barry, preoccupied with basketball and girls, to the serious man of destiny – a transformation the former president says still has his high school friends wondering, "How the hell did that happen?"

The answer in part was an uneasiness in his own skin that itched to the point it could no longer be ignored. Obama described himself as being "from everywhere and nowhere at once, a combination of ill-fitting parts like a platypus or some imaginary beast".

He finds his cure in books, and pinpoints a Honolulu jumble sale, from which he walks away with a stack of secondhand finds that sparks an addiction. They become his companion, solace and guide, though he admits that, as with almost every undergraduate in history, some of his literary quests had mixed motives: he read Marx and Marcuse so he could talk to the "long-legged socialist" in his dorm, and Foucault and Woolf "for the ethereal bisexual who wore mostly black". Orders have surely been issued already in newsrooms around the country, for both women to be tracked down.

Woman?

Are you sure about that?

Would Amazon's facial recognition software recognize it as "female"?

I think this is what they call a "trial balloon," testing how Barry's Big Secret will play if it's ever revealed.

Obama's going to keep releasing autobiographies every year, isn't he?

He's going to be the first man to publish 22 autobiographies. It'll be like the MCU, but with a half-black bisexual socialist.

posted by Ace at 07:00 PM

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