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There were tears and cheers as Sophie Grégoire Trudeau launched her book Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other, among friends and family Monday evening at Hotel Gault in Old Montreal.
Grégoire Trudeau has been on a media blitz over the past few days, including an appearance on the season finale of hit Quebec talk show Tout le monde en parle Sunday night, but this was different.
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“I’m looking out at the room, and I’m not going to cry,” she said, fighting back tears. “I recognize faces that I have loved, adored, who have been there for me in amazing times in my life, and the hardest times as well. You know who you are. You believed in me from the beginning. I want to thank all the people I’ve played with in this room. Who have I had adventures with here?”
People hooted, hands shot up, as Grégoire Trudeau completed her thought: “There’s another one starting.”
Billed as a personalized guide to prioritizing our mental health, Closer Together is a mix of memoir and socio-cultural survey of some of the world’s top thinkers on the topic, sharing ideas on childhood and raising teenagers. On the back of the book are words of praise from Hillary Rodham Clinton, Arianna Huffington, Liz Plank and Gabor Maté.
“I’m filled with gratitude,” Grégoire Trudeau told the Gazette in a sit-down interview as the event got underway. “It’s my content and my story. When you show emotional vulnerability, it’s a sign of strength, and I hope it encourages people to look deeper inside themselves to find peace and balance in their own lives, because so many people are suffering right now.”
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Grégoire Trudeau is candid in the book about her own experience with eating disorders and anxiety on the road to mindfulness, self-awareness and self-love. She believes this first-hand experience allows her to understand what other people are living.
“We’re all one trauma away from each other,” she said. “I learned a while ago, but this book confirmed to me that we have much more power as human beings to influence the way we perceive ourselves with kindness and strength.”
Though she has lived a life of glamour as Canada’s first lady for nearly a decade, Grégoire Trudeau emphasized that that fame, accomplishments and material wealth have little to do with mental health.
“You could be in a big home with all the cars you want, all the objects you ever dreamed of and still be unhappy,” she said, “because you’re not emotionally regulated and you don’t have that richness inside that fills you. We’re all afraid of being abandoned. We all want to be loved for who we are.”
Closer Together is divided into three sections, one of which is titled Transitions. It’s a topic Grégoire Trudeau knows something about. In August of last year, she and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced they were separating after 18 years of marriage. But as the book’s front cover attests, at least one thing remains the same: She’s keeping the “Trudeau” in her last name.
“The dilemma is, I would like everybody to call me Sophie,” she said. “I’ve been called madame for years and it’s like, ‘Nooo, please stop, I want to be called Sophie; I’m Sophie. When the Grégoire is there, it’s important to me, but you have to be realistic: this book is going out into different countries and the people there have no idea who Sophie or Sophie Grégoire is, and that’s OK. I understand that for the past 10 years, that’s how people have known me, and I’m proud of that. I don’t have a problem with that.”
So she’ll remain a Trudeau for the foreseeable future?
“We’ll see how people relate,” she said, “and how they call me.”
tdunlevy@postmedia.com
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