Following the success of her 2018 memoir, Becoming, former first lady of the United State of America, Michelle Obama released a journal, titled Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice. This too has fast become a bestseller. Now, why would the former FLOTUS sell a notebook, you'd ask. Well, we at least didn't buy it. But, this one—unlike the list of things-we-don't-need that Marie Kondo started dishing out last year to much criticism—isn't quite useless. For several reasons.

When the title says "guided journal", it truly offers guidance. On every page, Obama shares a pearl of wisdom or tells you what to write about. Try this for therapy: "Write about a specific experience when someone dislodged a dream of yours by trying to lower your expectations. How did it make you feel? How did you try to overcome that obstacle?" After you have written this in about 20 lines, the next page does something more extraordinary. It allows you to find your own voice when it asks you to list five ways in which that person was wrong. Obama has once again in our eyes become a champion of finding one's own voice. And if the notebook does push you to difficult self-introspection, does Rs 632 seem too much?