Well of course it’s the best book of nonfiction of the year in that it’s about an important period in modern New Zealand social history by one of the most important New Zealanders in our entire island history, someone adored and loathed in equal intensity, now a world figure floating along as a symbol of something or other, possibly on track to the UN — her story is a central narrative of modern New Zealand life, and she told her side of it in a book that has sold around 50,000+ copies. No other book came anywhere near its hold on the New Zealand mind.
Very few reviews examined it as a book. Very many reviews expressed their thoughts on Jacinda Ardern. Some bore in Tory rag The Telegraph: “Don’t read this book. You won’t, anyway: it’s by Jacinda Ardern … Her virtue-signalling memoir is like one long therapy session.”
The Melbourne Age patronised it: “I’m surprised at how well written it is, how it balances humour and pathos, kindness and hardiness – and I can’t find a hint of a ghostwriter, although many thanks to editors.” Why surprising? Everyone in New Zealand politics knows that she wrote the vast majority of her speeches. She was always a close reader, who appreciated good prose. A rumour went around that she consulted Noelle McCarthy, author of that superb memoir Grand, for advice on memoir writing. I asked Noelle and she denied it. I liked the rumour, though; it was a departure from everyone else moaning on and on about its political content, and pointed to an author who was interested in how to tell a personal story, the structure, the form.
There are a lot of good pages in the book. It’s a classy work of literature — it always helps when a memoirist can actually write, and Ardern tells the story of her personal life and political career with skill, wit, and seriousness. It’s a radical departure from the junk of recent New Zealand political memoirs by Judith Collins and Steven Joyce, with their lousy prose, unexamined lives, and self-serving comms. Ardern rolls out self-serving comms, too, but she has a gift for bringing places alive, particularly the Murupara and Morrinsville of her childhood, and it’s an intensely personal book. We learn of her mother’s nervous breakdowns. We learn of her fertility treatments. We learn of her challenges as a parent. We learn of her falling in love and staying in love. Even more so than writing for an American audience, Ardern writes for women.
You come to her book wanting to know about her life, especially her eventful six years (Covid, March 15) as Prime Minister. There never was a Prime Minister like her before and there never will be again; she was a disruptor, interrupting the same old political bullshit and since her departure the same old political bullshit has settled back into place. Perhaps she really only stood for a new kind of political bullshit and heaven knows she had a genius for spin but the fact of the matter is that she ennobled the human spirit for a generation of voters. Ardern’s book revisits the best and worst of her years as head of state. Her account of the mosque shooting is harrowing. A poor memoirist would present a familiar version. Ardern makes it new. There are small, powerful details, like sitting in a plastic chair in the Defence Force airport hangar in Christchurch after visiting the crisis centre. Labour MP Michael Wood gives her a polystyrene cup of tea. “I’d been surrounded by so much grief. Now, on a plastic chair in the middle of an airport hangar, my own grief came flooding out.” And she reveals that she saw the shooter’s 17-minute live stream of the attack. She opened Instagram and stumbled upon it. “The video’s presence in my feed had been so shocking, so viscerally horrible, I’d thrown my phone down onto the floor.”
There is considerable storytelling skill, too, in her account of brief but crucial encounter in the ladies bathroom at Auckland Airport. “I was standing at the basin, washing my hands, when a woman walked in. She was maybe 50 or so, wearing a bright blue stretch top and large and plentiful jewellery.” And then: “She moved purposely towards me.” And then: “She stood next to me at the sink and leaned in closely, so close I could feel her heat against my cheek. I learned away slightly, my hands still under the tap. ‘I just wanted to say thank you,’ she said. There was a beat before she added, ‘Thanks for ruining the country.’ Then she turned on heels and disappeared into a bathroom stall.”
Showdown at the Koru Club lavatories! Shaken, possibly to this day, Ardern reflects, “What was happening? Whatever it was, it wasn’t contained to New Zealand. Something had been loosened worldwide.”
Who was that old bag slash rebel saviour who so unsettled her at sinkside? An invader of personal space, rattling her “large and plentiful jewellery”, she helped change the course of history. The book ends nine pages later with Ardern out of politics.
It’s a book of considerable elisions (almost every reviewer made the valid grouch that it didn’t confront her failings as Prime Minister) and praising it has to come with significant caveats (her empathy croonings are well-meaning, sincere, decent, boring, platitudinous, worthless, floating above the page like ice-cream castles in the air). But the author — not the politician, or the world figure, or the subject of love and hate — produced a thoughtful and sometimes intimate book, partly aimed at women, mainly written as a test of her intelligence and conscience. She passes the test. Obviously, objectively, it’s the best book of nonfiction of 2025.
