A memoir that knows exactly how much it's permitted to say, then says slightly more than that in the Chicago chapters. Those chapters are extraordinary.

Full disclosure before we start: I was ready to be sniffy about this. It arrived as an event rather than a book, with the record advance and the arena tour and a cover photograph that cost more to light than my flat is worth, and events are usually where prose goes to die.

It's better than that. Considerably.

The South Side chapters are why. The bungalow on Euclid Avenue, the piano upstairs, the father with MS getting slower on the stairs while nobody in the house names what is happening. The bit where a school counsellor tells her she isn't Princeton material and she applies out of spite as much as ambition is the most honest sentence she writes about how anybody actually gets anywhere. There's a long thread about being the only Black woman in rooms that were built by and for other people, and she writes it without one line of the uplift a memoir like this is expected to reach for.

Then the campaign starts and the temperature drops. Not to zero. But you can feel the second reader arriving, the one who has to sign off on what may be said about a sitting political marriage, about staff, about the woman herself on her worst day. The counselling admission is genuinely brave — and it's the only crack we are allowed. Everything after it is managed. The White House chapters read like a very good annual report with excellent anecdotes about a dog.

I don't hold that against her, particularly. What I hold against the reception is that it treated the managed half as the important half. Every profile I read that year wanted the Obama years. The Obama years are the least interesting part! The interesting part is a girl doing her homework at a kitchen table while her great-aunt teaches piano through the floorboards.

On the audiobook, since three of you asked: she reads it herself and she's good. She was a lawyer, she knows how to land a clause. It is long. Spread it over a fortnight and don't do what I did and listen to the Princeton section while assembling flat-pack furniture, because you will end up resenting both.

Femi's position is that the whole thing is a campaign document and the South Side material is bait. He is a cynic with a subscription and I love him for it, but is a bait chapter usually the best writing in the book? You can hear where this wants to go and where it is allowed to go, and the person is standing in the gap between the two.

Eight. If you read only the first third you would get most of what's good in it, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend the last third earns its keep.