Never mind if I liked it. This lapsed perfectionist wants to know: Did I notice the lone spelling mistake she failed to catch?
Closer Together is billed as a memoir, but it’s interspersed with interviews that Grégoire Trudeau conducted with a wellness aisle’s worth of therapists, life coaches, and social scientists. All of whom are still swirling around in her brain. In the span of three hours, she quotes Eckhart Tolle, the author Brianna Wiest, the Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön, and the therapist and writer Esther Perel. The stated aim of Closer Together is to guide readers toward “self-knowledge, acceptance, and empowerment.” It’s at least as much an attempt to understand and fiddle with her own “emotional hard-wiring.” She recalls her relationship with her parents—Jean, a bank teller turned stockbroker, and Estelle, a former nurse—and the sometimes loneliness of her childhood without brothers or sisters. Hers has to be the single memoir of a world leader’s wife to include a section on the “erotic intelligence in all of us.”
Grégoire Trudeau was born near Montreal, a through-and-through French Canadian who has retained the barest lilt of an accent. Without siblings, other relationships took on almost spiritual significance. Her friendships felt fated; her cousins gave her a tribe. She was social, clever, and active, which did not spare her from the onset and ravages of an eating disorder. She was 17 when it started. She didn’t get help until she confided in her mother after a gruesome night of purging. “That moment for me was filled with fragility, fear, trembling,” she says. She was 21.
After she graduated from college, Grégoire Trudeau moved into an apartment that she shared with a parakeet named Fiji and a rabbit named Polka. She started working in advertising, a field she happily admits she knew nothing about. Determined to dress the part, she wore a suit and tie to her interview and labored over her hair until it approximated Sharon Stone’s. (She was hired.) Then came a job in PR. After a stint in an entertainment postgraduate program, she was tapped to be a “ticker writer” on a Canadian news network. She was a glorified closed-captionist, but she loved it. A few months later, she aced an open casting call and was hired as a culture reporter for the Quebec television station LCN. TV and radio thrilled her, even if the freelance nature of the work was less exhilarating. She spent 18 months as a personal shopper between contracts.
In her late 20s, Grégoire Trudeau was hired as a full-time reporter for eTalk, a news show on Canada’s CTV network. She crossed paths with Trudeau around the same time. She’d known him since childhood, having grown up with his brother Michel, who was killed in an avalanche in 1998. She and Trudeau were asked to cohost the same event in 2003, and they reconnected. He flirted. She emailed after, but he didn’t respond. She ran into him on the street a few months later and when he asked for her number, she demurred, still smarting from the brush-off. He could find it if he wanted to reach her, she told him. He found it. They were married in 2005.
Trudeau had been a teacher, but politics beckoned as a kind of inheritance. Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, had served as prime minister, and Trudeau followed him into parliament in 2008. It was in this period that Justin and Sophie’s two oldest children were born. Looking to carve out her own space, Grégoire Trudeau immersed herself in yoga, completing teacher training and becoming a certified instructor. Her mentor Barrie Risman recalls how Grégoire Trudeau brought Trudeau with her to Risman’s studio in Montreal. Grégoire Trudeau tells me she has no political aspirations, but her near decade of experience with world leaders has shown her what she has to offer. “I would love to teach a lot of them yoga,” she says.
In 2015, Trudeau was elected prime minister. Grégoire Trudeau’s cousin Annie Grégoire was elated, but anxious: “I thought Canada might not be ready for Sophie Grégoire,” she says.
It wasn’t. Within months of the election, Grégoire Trudeau set the internet ablaze when she characterized the new demands on her time as overwhelming. She wanted to participate in public life and respond to the deluge of invitations and opportunities, but she didn’t have the staff to handle the influx. Canada doesn’t recognize the wives of its prime ministers as official first ladies and so it accords them almost no budget. “I have three children and a husband who is prime minister,” Grégoire Trudeau said at the time. “I need help. I need a team to help me serve people.”
The opposition pounced. On social media, the hashtag #PrayforSophie drew lacerating criticism. In part, the disapproval reflected that quirk of the Canadian political apparatus. There is no East Wing equivalent in Ottawa. Grégoire Trudeau did have an assistant, and two nannies helped at home, but she was not entitled to an office in the Langevin Block or the aides who might have come with it. At the same time, she had become—in a matter of months—the most visible spouse to a prime minister since her own mother-in-law, the dashing and burdened Margaret Trudeau.