America rushed to bookstores last November for former First Lady Michelle Obama's stirring memoir Becoming, making it the country's most sold book in just 15 days.
By March, the book sold an astounding 10 million copies and is on pace to become one of the most widely read autobiographies ever printed.
On Monday, Obama announced she was blessing audiences with a companion publication titled Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice.
According to People, the new book will be released on November 19 and will help her ardent fans learn how to tell their own story.
The publisher behind the book, Penguin Random House, told People the book will feature "more than 150 inspiring questions and quotes that resonate with key themes in Mrs. Obama’s memoir and that are designed to help readers reflect on their personal and family history, their goals, challenges, and dreams, what moves them and brings them hope, and what future they imagine for themselves and their community.”
The introduction to the book was shared with People, who posted it to their website.
“I’d only kept a journal for a short period of my life, for a couple of years during my late twenties as I was getting more serious with Barack and contemplating a new career. It was a tumultuous time filled with change, and I found that dedicating time to writing my thoughts down helped me navigate all the transitions. Then I put it away and didn’t pick it up again until I began writing my memoir. Instantly, I was transported back to that earlier version of myself, with all the warmth, heartbreak, and frustration flooding in," Obama writes in the book's introduction.
“The experience left me asking myself, ‘Why didn’t I journal more?’ The answer, like for so many of you, I’m sure, was that I simply got busy. I switched careers. I got married. I had children. Somewhere along the line, I ended up in ball gowns at the White House, however that happened," she wrote.
The followup book will cost $19.99 and add on to the insights she shared in the first book, which ranged from stories about her marriage to her thoughts on Donald Trump.
The Obamas have been busy since leaving the White House, starting their very own production company in a deal with Netflix.
Through their Higher Ground production company, the couple released a documentary in August called American Factory about post-industrial Ohio. The Obama-produced film got rave reviews at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and won the Directing Award for a U.S. Documentary.
Higher Ground is working on a new children's show, and a film of Frederick Douglass' biography is in the works. They're even working with The New York Times on a series called Overlooked that will use the newspaper's extensive backlog of obituaries to spotlight people of color lost to the pages of history. Former President Barack Obama is also working on his own memoir.
Becoming was a groundbreaking book in terms of sales, with more than 700,000 copies sold in just the first day. Penguin Random House’s Chief Executive Markus Dohle told the Wall Street Journal he wasn't sure any memoir had ever sold more than 10 million copies.
The new book will go through Obama's struggles to keep journaling and methods other people can use to stick to it.
“Looking back, I wish I’d taken more time to write down what I was thinking and feeling. I didn’t journal much because I talked myself out of it—journaling can feel a little intimidating and layered with implication, the idea being that once you put pen to paper, your thoughts have extra weight and meaning," Obama said in the introduction.
“What I recognize now, though, is far more simple: We don’t have to remember everything. But everything we remember has value,’“ Obama said.
