Obama's Old Fling Shares Love Letters In New Book

The president was shacking up in the 80s

Author David Maraniss may not have found any birth certificates for his new book Barack Obama: The Story but he may have found something better, an ex-girlfriend.

The book will not be published until later this month, but Vanity Fair got their hands on it and shared some of the more intimate moments of the book, including love letters that he wrote to his first "real" girlfriend, Genevieve Cook.

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He met Cook in New York City when he was living in Manhattan, going to Columbia University, holding down a job at Chanticleer Press, a company that made coffee-table books. After spending some months dating, Obama eventually moved in with Cook. She kept a journal the entire time. Not because she felt like he was going to be the President someday, but because she just kept a journal. Now, sharing journal for use in a book? Yes, she has to be doing that because he's the President. 

Some of the journal entries paint a nice picture of Obama (he cooked her dinner on their first date), others paint him as a lost soul searching for an identity (he used to carry a copy of Invisible Man on him). Others simply show him as a dude she couldn't live with. Yes, the President was shacking up. Take these two entries for instance:

Monday, December 10, 1984
After a week of Barack and I adjusting to each others constant presence and his displacement, I expect that this week will make it hard to be alone again when he has gone [to Hawaii for Christmas]. We got very irritated w/ each other Fri. night and Saturday, talked about it.