Obama seemed to come from nowhere.

It was as if he’d been created fresh hours before his DNC speech, the perfect candidate, perfect husband, perfect American, perfect man.

A new book by Pulitzer Prize winner David J. Garrow tries to figure out just where Obama came from, and how he came to be the president he was. 

Called Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, the book, according to The Washington Post, is dark, tough on Obama, and more than a little messy.

Garrow’s Obama is a man who is coldly calculating, and who made himself what he needed to be in order to get what he wanted: the presidency of the United States of America. 

The book alleges that young Obama was a fiction writer who wanted to change communities; that he identified as multicultural, and lived with a woman he loved who was not Michelle, but a woman of Japanese-Dutch ancestry named Sheila Miyoshi Jager.

Things were wonderful; the couple was in love — Barack asked her to marry him. She wanted to, but her parents told her to wait a while, until she was older.

Jager took their advice, and then there was a change. “He became … so very ambitious,” almost overnight, Jager told Garrow, “I remember very clearly when this transformation happened, and I remember very specifically that by 1987, about a year into our relationship, he had already had his sights on becoming president.”

After that, Jager says, the couple became, “an island unto ourselves,” especially as Obama began to craft his political persona. No longer would he allow anyone to call him “Barry,” no longer was he mixed, no longer was he uninterested in Christianity. And no longer could he date a white woman.

“The lines are very clearly drawn,” friends remember Obama saying as he discussed running for office, “If I am going out with a white woman, I have no standing.”

Garrow writes, “He felt trapped between the woman he loved and the destiny he knew was his,” and describes very public fights, as well as passionate arguments between the couple in front of their friends that always seemed to end with the two making a quick exit for loud make-up sex.

The next part you know: Obama went to Harvard. Jager went to Korea for her dissertation, upset — Barack had asked her to come to Cambridge with him, to put her career on hold.

Garrow has some juicy tidbits about Obama at Harvard as well — that he wasn’t the cool young man we imagine, but a slightly insufferable know-it-all, saved socially only by the fact that he did actually have to intellect to back up his constantly running mouth.

And too, that while dating Michelle, Obama continued to see Jager behind her back once she’d won a prestigious teaching fellowship at Harvard thanks to her time in Korea. 

Obama and Jager cut off all contact after Barack and Michelle got married; despite this, Garrow reports that the couple we all now think of as goals got off to a rocky start, with Michelle pressuring Barack to leave the political scene for a high paying job in law, much to his constant irritation.

And there’s more, from Obama’s cocaine habit to his dismissiveness with his children — Garrow’s book is a tome, over 1,000 pages — and he has very carefully uncovered all of the things our former president did that were maybe not the best.

If you’d like to find out more and check it Garrow’s profile for yourself, the book is out now from William Morrow.