02-06-2025
Jacinda, the first review
Announcing the winner of the YA book awards. Much of Jacinda Ardern's new memoir reads like an experiment in Young Adult literature—the heartwarming story of a Mormon who lost her faith but held onto her values, and even now continues her lifelong mission of knocking on doors to spread the message that love and a left-wing vote conquers all. The door is America. A Different Kind of Power is written with the American market in mind—she informs readers that Whanganui is 'a town on the west coast of the North Island'—and aimed at a particular kind of young, liberal, educated American idiot eager to drink the Kool-Aid that Ardern goes around dispensing in her various meaningless roles in the US as an ambassador of kindness. Be vulnerable, she advises throughout A Different Kind of Power. Be sensitive. Above all, be kind. I remember the first time I heard her articulate this sort of thing when she tried it on at a rather dismal Labour Party event in the Grey Lynn RSA in about 2011. Labour were in opposition, lost and afraid; Ardern was a list MP, optimistic and possibly insane. 'I've been thinking about a politics based on love,' she said, and even the party faithful looked at her like she was mad. She was an artist ahead of her time. The world has caught up with her and many will likely regard her book as a panacea in America's dark second age of Trump, and our own gormless time of Luxon.
Her messages on how we ought to conduct our lives in good conscience and with empathy are well-meaning, sincere, decent, boring, platitudinous, worthless, floating above the page like ice-cream castles in the air. 'To the criers, worriers and huggers,' she writes in her dedication. The tracks of her tears salt the pages of A Different Kind of Power. She remembers watching a romcom as a teenager, and was torn apart by 'big, ugly, heaving sobs'. She remembers Labour losing the 2014 election, and crying herself to sleep that night, racked with 'big, despairing sobs'. Tears, she learns, are her superpower. 'Sensitivity was my weakness, my tragic flaw,' she writes of her uncertainties in her early political career. But the lesson of A Different Kind of Power is to treasure your sadness. Do not harden up; soften up. Dog does not eat dog; trust that bad dogs will die howling in the gutter, which is the lesson of the book's one extraordinary detour into vengeance when she singles out the only person that she sticks it to in 333 pages, David Cunliffe.
Alas poor Cunliffe! He was last seen in New Zealand public life brooding on his Log of Doom, in 2014, when he was photographed sitting on a washed-up log on Herne Bay beach the morning after he led Labour to its worst result since 1922. But now Ardern introduces him to an American public who had hitherto never heard of the vainglorious sap and parades him as the villain of A Different Kind of Power. In a pitiless nine-page section, Cunliffe is seen as a phoney ('It was hard not to be left wondering about his authenticity'), a weakling ('No one should build an office of people who simply agree with you'), not worth wasting her breath on ('That would mean dignifying his statement with a response'), dragging out his exit but finally leaving ('For the first time in a long while, I felt relieved'). They are among the best pages in the book.
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, and with some particularly arresting passages told in second person: 'When you run for parliament, you wait to find out whether people will choose you, or first, whether your party will. But sometimes, deep down, you already know.' It's a radical departure from the junk of recent New Zealand political memoirs by such as 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 Murapara 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 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.' She keeps to her promise of not naming the shooter. She prefers to write of victims and survivors, heroes and sympathisers. Of course these are the saddest pages in the book.
The happiest pages are about Neve, and the 'village' of family around her. The book opens with Ardern taking a pregnancy test while Winston Peters kept everyone guessing if he would form a government with either Labour or National in 2017: 'I was days away from learning if I would run the country, and now as I sat in a bathroom in Tawa, New Zealand, I was seconds away from learning if I would do it while having a baby.' Note the editorial geomarker of 'Tawa, New Zealand' for American readers. The book closes with walking Neve home from daycare and watching her daughter balance on the edge of 'the kerb'—the pavement nomenclature signalling she has resigned as Prime Minister, left New Zealand and moved to Boston. Neve informs her mum, 'But mum, we should never give up.' Ardern turns up the volume (swelling violins, a celestial harp) on these last pages of her YA epic, and writes, 'I could have told her I started a fellowship in empathetic leadership so I could keep working with other people who were in politics, but wanted to do it differently.' Instead, she smiles at her daughter, and chirps, 'You're right, Neve. We should never give up.' Readers will try not to throw up.
And then there are the chapters on Covid. Again, she pulls readers close, shows us her own bubble, the silent 10 floors of the Beehive in lockdown Level 4, the sense of fear: 'I felt as if I were taking New Zealand into battle. Maybe I was.' She was. It ends with the Battle of Parliament Lawn. Ardern watches the Occupation from her window and realises something has changed, changed utterly. It's crystallised in a brief 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.' A terrible stupidity had been born.
The book ends nine pages later. Ardern steps down as PM, heads for Boston's kerbs. Who was that old bag slash rebel saviour who so unsettled her at sinkside? It would be good to know. She helped change the course of history. Come forward, rattling your 'large and plentiful jewellery', and make yourself known! Equally, who is the unnamed National MP who Ardern describes as attacking her in parliament? 'She looked gleeful. She was an incredibly smart woman—self-assured and well respected by all sides. She wore tailored suits and sounded as if she were private school educated. But here she was, hair bobbing back and forth with a flushed face, pointing her finger in my direction…'
Ardern is not big on names. She can't even be bothered naming Judith Collins when Ardern writes of slaughtering her at the polls in 2020. Only three journalists are mentioned by name: Barry Soper, disparagingly as you might expect, and Jesse Mulligan and John Campbell, glowingly as you would entirely predict. I make a cameo entrance, sadly unnamed, giving her a sound thrashing at ping-pong. She writes of her 2017 election campaign, 'I shook thousands of hands, gave even more hugs…I gave interviews, often many a day. I answered questions while I was still in my bathrobe, and in the back of cars, and on the emptied stages of community halls, and once while playing ping-pong as a camera clicked nearby. My opponent in that match, a journalist for the New Zealand Herald, also decided to test me about my visit to a Pink Batts insulation factory a month earlier. 'What is Pink Batts made from?' he asked. 'Fibre and recycled glass,' I responded. 'What kind of glass?' 'Offcuts from window glass.' 'And what temperature is the molten glass when it's heated?' I paused. 'Twelve hundred degrees.' He corrected me then: the answer was thirteen hundred. A campaign was a constant test…'
I conducted a series of interviews while playing ping-pong with political leaders. Phil Goff was the best player, crushing me into the dust. David Seymour was the worst, flapping his arms like a goose. I enjoyed all of the games but the most enjoyable opponent was Ardern. I always liked her company; she held her whiskey like a good 'un, laughed at herself, was very funny. She kind of makes the same self-effacing joke twice in A Different Kind of Power but both times I laughed out loud. She describes her very first candidate meeting, in Matamata, when her mum and grandma were in the audience. 'My grandmother was not a Labour supporter, not at all. But as I answered the question about climate change, at least she wasn't booing me, like the other attendees. I kept my eyes on her for one more beat. At least I don't think my grandmother was booing me.' Later, she writes about her romantic life, when she lived in London: 'There had a been steady stream of bad dates, like the lovely journalist who decided to move to Africa–or at least I think he moved to Africa…'
She is similarly disarming about all her relationships. 'For years my love life, if you could call it that, had been beset by both humiliation and constant failure. At university, I mostly dated Mormons. In London, I'd had two boyfriends who split up with me because of my career….Since entering parliament, the longest relationship I'd had in was three months.' And then she met Clarke Gayford. They were first introduced at the Metro restaurant of the year awards (she went 'with my friend Colin', curiously shaving off the surname of model Colin Mathura-Jeffree). They later have a coffee in Three Lamps (for American readers, a street corner in the Auckland suburb of Ponsonby). Then they go out to sea on his boat….It's very sweet, very romantic, and she writes straight from the heart, although sometimes with strange metaphors: falling in love, she writes, 'was a bit like running for parliament the first time'. There is someone else who she gives her heart to: Grant Robertson. It's a book of friendship.
It's an entertaining story. Weird little Mormon kid becomes world figure. Such was her manifest destiny ('Sometimes, deep down, you already know'); as the youngest daughter of the town cop, she got around on a green Raleigh bike, and was moved to tears when she heard the evangelical call to arms of Cat Stevens' song 'Peace Train'. She was seldom naughty; the worst thing she can remember of her misbehaviour is the confession, 'I called my sister a cow a few too many times.' As an adult, the only job she had before becoming an MP was in politics. She volunteered for Labour's New Plymouth candidate Harry Duynhoven in the 1999 election, and writes, 'I paid attention to everything, every detail of the campaign.' I can well believe it. Ardern never does things by halves, or even by wholes; a theme of A Different Kind of Power is that she goes the extra distance, rabbits on, bangs the empathy drum through the streets of her book, all hear-ye hear-ye, a town crier literally crying her head off at the sorrows of the world but determined to face its evils with a sopping handkerchief and a set of wet slogans. It's a very Jacinda Ardern book, as in true to her idea of herself. It works. This is going to sell by the shipload and it may even help to make the world a better place. Everyone jump up on the peace train.
A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir by Jacinda Ardern (Penguin, $59.99) is available in every bookstore across the land. ReadingRoom is devoting all week to coverage of the book. Tomorrow: a review by Janet Wilson.
