Former President Barack Obama shared some behind the scenes of their lives in a new 768-page tome A Promised Land.
The new book focuses not only on Obama’s political career as a state senator in Illinois and his years in the White House but also his struggles to quit smoking.
In the memoir obtained by CNN, Obama admitted that he would smoke up to ten cigarettes a day, searching for a ‘discreet location to grab an evening smoke.’
He said he stopped after his eldest daughter Malia caught him smoking, writing she ‘frowned’ after ‘smelling a cigarette on my breath.’
Many people find it difficult to quit the habit and Obama was also one of them. But thanks to his daughter, the former president managed to quit the habit for good.
In a 2009- press conference, the former president admitted: “As a former smoker I constantly struggle with it. ave I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes. Am I daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don’t do it in front of my kids. I don’t do it in front of my family.
“And, you know, I would say that I am 95% cured, but there are times where there are times where I mess up.”
Obama also writes in his memoir about how life in the White House affected his marriage.
When he became president, he and Michelle Obama had been married 16 years. Malia was only ten and Sasha was seven.
“Despite Michelle’s success and popularity, I continued to sense an undercurrent of tension in her, subtle but constant, like the faint thrum of a hidden machine,” he shares.
“It was as if, confined as we were within the walls of the White House, all her previous sources of frustration became more concentrated, more vivid, whether it was my round the clock absorption with work, or the way politics exposed our family to scrutiny and attacks, or the tendency of even friends and family members to treat her role as secondary in importance.
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He also adds that there were nights “lying next to Michelle in the dark, I’d think about those days when everything between us felt lighter, when her smile was more constant and our love less encumbered, and my heart would suddenly tighten at the thought that those days might not return.”
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