I spent more than a month driving around and listening to Barack Obama read his memoir, A Promised Land, as I commuted along a straight stretch of highway, five days a week. I realized early on that I wanted to have the same experience with his wife Michelle. Her book came out a few years earlier, and it had turned into an overwhelming bestseller. Yet I never took the chance then to buy it or to borrow it from a library. Why shouldn't I let her read it to me now, instead? I figured that since their stories would obviously overlap, I would get to hear the other side of the story, so to speak. And I sure did.

Her 426-page book translates into 16 CDs that provide 19 hours of listening. We learn quite quickly that the former First Lady is just as good a storyteller and just as accomplished a speaker as her husband is. She takes us back to her home on the South Side of Chicago in the 1960s-80s, and to the close-knit comfort of her expansive middle-class family, made up of Robinsons and Shields. She's honest in her talk of how her father, Fraser Robinson, was disabled by multiple sclerosis, and how he alternatively coped with or chose not to deal directly with this chronic disease. We follow Michelle through her education: from Bryn Mawr School and Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, and on to Princeton University and Harvard University. Readers and listeners who are familiar with the Chicago landscape will have an advantage when it comes to placing and understanding Michelle's hometown geography.

While the guy she eventually married is an admitted "fact collector," Michelle is a devoted "box checker." She always arms herself with a plan and a to-do list that she adheres to. And after earning her college degrees, she aims for a position in law. But she finds her first job with a law firm to be boring and professionally unfulfilling. By then, she had met a few people who had "swerved," and who had deviated from traditional expectations. Is this something she could or should dare to do herself? She would rather do something meaningful for the community at large than manage legal paperwork.

It is at this law firm, Sidley & Austin in downtown Chicago, that she meets a summer intern named Barack Obama. He is five years older than she is, and he is in the midst of earning his own law degree from Harvard. He had spent several years working as a community organizer in Chicago, and he knew the city and its culture well. Since we have the benefit of knowing how their growing friendship will turn out, we can have a lot of fun watching their relationship begin and blossom.

Michelle gradually finds her professional niche, with Chicago nonprofits and city government offices. And Barack finds his, in politics. We follow his campaigns, which grow ever more surreal and demanding as he moves from state to federal offices. Michelle is honest in how she feels about it all. And then: they're in the White House! Where daily life is even MORE surreal. She describes this experience with exactly the kind of details that anyone would be curious about. It's insane, really. What we discover along the way is just how people-oriented both of the Obamas are, and how driven they are to launch programs to help solve social problems. And how they both hope their daughters can have normal childhoods, in spite of living in the public eye. Michelle's book ends as the Obamas leave the White House. We can hear and feel her fury at her husband's successor. Yet, she manages to end her story with optimism.

Becoming, the book itself, could easily serve as a model for memoir writing. Michelle Obama seems so sure of herself in her ability to look back at and recognize the defining moments of her life. We all have histories that include certain events that will inform and influence the rest of our lives, even if we don't understand their importance at the time. By sharing her memories, Michelle offers us informal inspiration. Here's someone who has all these great stories from her childhood, and many of them will have future impact on the paths she chooses. Which stories would we tell from our own lives, if we were given the chance to share them? Which moments changed us or made us swerve?

One downside to listening to the audiobook is that you don't get to see the 16 pages of photos from the printed one. Now that our libraries have reopened for browsing, I plan to walk into our local one and peek inside hardcover editions of both of the Obama books. I want to check out what I missed.

Becoming is a bestseller for many good reasons. Michelle Obama is a terrific role model as a successful professional woman, as an African American woman, as an initially reluctant celebrity and as a person who continues to make a difference in the world. And hers is, simply put, a compelling story, no matter one's political inclinations. If you admire her and/or her husband in any way, you will admire them even more after finishing this book.

I don't make a practice of listening to audiobooks. But I'm glad that Michelle and Barack Obama shared my commute this year, and I will miss hearing their voices in my car. Memoirs told by the writers themselves can be especially impactful. I recommend reading or listening to both A Promised Land and Becoming, in this order, because Michelle's book provides more closure by ending in January 2017. (The President is working on a sequel that will cover his second term and beyond.) Certainly, you can choose just one or the other, or really, neither. But man, the cumulative punch of both together? Wow. The result may be time consuming, but it's well worth the ride. Literally.