Jacinda Ardern: Why writing her memoir was ‘therapy with a deadline’

Sunday, 1 June 2025

Dame Jacinda Ardern never felt she had sharp enough elbows for politics. History proved otherwise. She tells Frances Morton about embracing self-doubt and empathy in leadership and what comes next.

“To the criers, worriers and huggers.”

That’s the dedication at the start of Dame Jacinda Ardern’s memoir, A Different Kind of Power.

So when did she last cry?

“Gosh, I think probably it might have been doing the audio of the book,” which she recorded a fortnight before we speak on a clear, spring day in Cambridge, Massachusetts where the trees near her Harvard office are in full bloom. A modest-sized shelf stacked with books is on the wall behind her and she smiles broadly into the video call, looking – there’s only one word for it – relaxed.

Ardern is about to share her story with the world. She’s worked with multiple editors to get it ready for different territories, from the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, but the editions are largely the same, “with the exception of trying to flip out words like, diaper over nappy. It’s very, very similar.

“I want this to be something for the person who doubts themself, the person that believes that a different kind of leadership is possible, or the path that they wish to take, or the person who wants to believe in politics, and that you can lead with empathy. So in that sense, that wasn’t country specific. But I wanted a New Zealander to pick it up and feel like it was their story.”

One of the sections that brought her to tears while recording the audio version was recounting what happened during and after the Christchurch mosque attacks of March 15, 2019.

It was a harrowing time for New Zealanders and her account will trigger the same emotions readers felt six years ago.

“I imagine for New Zealanders reading it, it will bring back their own set of memories and their own set of emotions,” says Ardern. “I read it several times. I couldn’t do a version where I didn’t cry.”

The publishing deal with Penguin was announced in mid-2023. Writing the book has given Ardern a chance to finally process the events of her political career, particularly the relentless pace of her years as prime minister.

Ardern admits she is not a big reader of political memoirs and deliberately avoided them when coming to write her own. Two memoirs she has read and admires are Smile by playwright Sarah Ruhl,who suffered Bell’s palsy and lost the ability to smile after the birth of her twins, and Lab Girl by scientist Hope Jahren about life in the male-dominated world of research laboratories.

Anyone looking for a blow-by-blow technical breakdown or justifications of her political decisions, particularly during the Covid years, will find Ardern has taken a more personal approach. “I didn’t want to feel like I was putting my version of events or being defensive. I wanted to share the experiences that really stayed with me, really struck me.”

She unpacks her younger years and pivotal events that shaped her values and outlook on life: the suicide of a friend’s brother, her struggles to align her views on homosexuality with the teachings of her Mormon faith, growing up in Murupara where her police officer father diffused drunken brawls on their front lawn and her mother suffered a mental breakdown.

“A friend of mine called [writing the book] therapy with a deadline. I was like, that is really accurate,” says Ardern. “I just came to the conclusion that there are some things [like March 15] that you just never get over.”

Ardern also gives insights into what it was like to learn she was pregnant, 13 days before being sworn in as prime minister, aged 37. For her first scan, she pretended to be seeing friends and visited the obstetrician after dark, using a fake name and wielding a bottle of wine as part of the pretence while the Dignitary Protection Service waited outside, none the wiser.

“New Zealanders had placed so much trust in me to come and do this job and I was so mindful of now I had this extra piece of information and I just wanted people to have time to get to know me and see my commitment to the role before I introduced this new situation, this new development. So it was really important to me that we had the time. And also because you never know. Early on you never know. I was a geriatric mother,” says Ardern, using the medical term for mothers over 35.

“They have got to work on that phrase,” she adds, with a smile.

While pregnant she asked advice from the queen of public mothers … the Queen. “You just get on with it,” Elizabeth II replied.

Things had gone from “Let’s do it”, Ardern’s slogan in the seven-week sprint of the 2017 election campaign, to “Just get on with it”. Ardern had to do just that during Covid, a time that saw her popularity soar when Labour was voted in with a majority (50.01%) in 2020 and then plunge when public division grew in the aftermath of the pandemic.

“We wanted to do two things through Covid. I wanted to save people’s lives and to keep people together and it turned out to be incredibly difficult to do both,” says Ardern.

“I don’t see it in a black and white way. I will of course always celebrate the roughly 20,000 lives it’s estimated that New Zealanders collectively saved. Absolutely I wish we could have done that in a way that brought everyone with us.”

Ardern is often asked about her resignation from the job of prime minister, which she announced in January 2023, following her summer break in her happy place, near the sea on the East Coast with her family. She understands why.

“It’s like we don’t give ourselves permission to think about changing roles where we feel a deep sense of responsibility,” she says.

“I think people look for the simplicity of ‘What’s the singular thing?’ And there was no singular thing. But the same thing that took me to the job was the same thing that took me out of it, and that was my sense of responsibility. That was the reason to take on the mantle when it came, but it was also the reason to say, actually now it’s time to go too.”

Yet it’s impossible to ignore the rising sense of aggression towards Ardern at the time. There had been protests on parliament grounds a year earlier at which demonstrators displayed images of Ardern with a Hitler moustache and erected a gallows. Ardern says she has always managed her own social media account, even when in office – “yeah, you see what’s on there”. She writes of people coming up to her on the street with fury in their faces, and the growing trend of politicians being dehumanised. So how much was fear of violence a factor in her departure?

“This was not a deciding factor for me. It was not. It’s really important for me that that’s clear,” says Ardern firmly.

And she’s equally adamant she has no regrets about stepping down. “No,” she repeats three times.

For the last two years, Ardern has been living in the US, after taking up a fellowship at Harvard University.

What is a fellowship? “Great question,” laughs Ardern. “When I took one on I said, ‘What does this mean?’.” Day-to-day it means working with students in the School of Public Health, School of Education and the Kennedy School of Government. “I’ve engaged with people who are part way through their careers and come back for executive education across crisis management, crisis communication. I’ve held office hours with students, given a lot of speeches and talks and worked with Harvard on a case study on [cattle disease] Mycoplasma bovis.”

She was last in New Zealand at Christmas. And she calls her time in the US with husband Clarke Gayford and daughter Neve (now 6 and no, she doesn’t have an American accent) a “brief interval”.

“New Zealand is our home. It will always be our home,” says Ardern, adding she doesn’t know when that brief interval will be over.

“One of the realisations for me, or confirmations for me in this period, has been that I am an active relaxer. I always believed that to be true, but now Clarke can now confirm that that is definitely true.”

That means there are endless projects beyond the Harvard posting. There was writing the book, of course, but also Ardern’s work on The Christchurch Call, a global initiative set up in the wake of March 15 to stop the spread of terrorist and violent extremist content online. She also works on environmental causes with Prince William’s Earthshot Prize, Conservation International and with Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures to support the health, wellbeing and security of women.

But perhaps the initiative that most walks the talk of A Different Kind of Power is the Field Fellowship that Ardern has set up to focus on “strong empathetic leadership” in what its website calls “today’s challenging political climate” – “a dumpster fire” as she called it in a recent speech to Yale graduates

The first intake is a group of 14 European politicians and leaders, all female, including Norway’s Minister of Labour and Social Inclusion, Tonje Brenna and Poland’s Minister for Equality, Katarzyna Kotula.

“Part of my thinking was, how do we create a network of support for leaders who are leading in that way? To share with one another, support one another, talk about policy and just encourage those who are looking to lead differently.”

Ardern has witnessed the return of Donald Trump to the White House during her time in the US. While she won’t be drawn directly on what it has meant for the country, she connects it to trends in global politics. The world is dealing with rapid technological change, financial insecurity and war.

“Politicians have to take on those challenges and present real world solutions to people that will make a meaningful difference in their lives. And that is challenging. Finding real solutions is challenging. The easy option is to adopt fear and blame and othering, and those have always been in easy reach for politicians. And have been used across decades, but what I feel passionate about is reminding people that there are alternative forms of leadership and that people should maintain their expectations of that leadership in difficult times.”

At 44, Ardern is firmly established as a political player on the international stage. So is it time for another motto?

“I remember at the beginning of 2020, telling my chief of staff that my motto for that year was I was going to be zen. So when Covid arrived, I decided that I should abandon mottos because they were not serving me well,” she laughs.

Politics trains you to always look 10 paces ahead, says Ardern. “You have to anticipate the risk, the challenge, if you’re lucky, the opportunity. So I've trained myself out of just being where I was. And I’m trying to train myself back to that now because I think I owe that to my family.”

A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern, published by Penguin, is out Tuesday.

Main image Jillian Freyer, hair and makeup Min-ah Campos