Three months after she announced her separation from Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau accepted an invitation from her friend Huma Abedin to attend an intimate dinner in New York. The women-led womenswear brand Argent had convened it, and Abedin—longtime aide to former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her current chief of staff—was a cohost. “Come,” Abedin urged her. It would be Grégoire Trudeau’s kind of crowd—activists and journalists, a podcast guru or two. Clinton herself would make an appearance during cocktail hour to toast women’s leadership. Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California governor Gavin Newsom, would be there. Like them, Grégoire Trudeau had once been a political spouse. Now she was something else.
Her split from the prime minister—communicated via Instagram in August—had been a surprise, not least to those who had once judged the Trudeaus #CouplesGoals. In near-identical statements, the duo, who had been married for almost two decades, pledged “deep love and respect for each other” and continued devotion to their three children: Xavier, 16; Ella-Grace, 15; and Hadrien, 10. In a more conventional release, a spokesperson indicated that Trudeau and Grégoire Trudeau had signed “a legal separation agreement,” which would remain private.
Of all the immediate changes to Grégoire Trudeau’s life—no more government staffers breaking down her schedule into 12-minute increments, no need to socialize with the spouses while the electeds did business—the most startling was a newfound freedom. Grégoire Trudeau could simply accept Abedin’s invitation, and spend her New York weekend as she pleased.
So when the actor Justin Theroux invited Abedin and Grégoire Trudeau to an after-dinner shindig downtown, the answer was immediate. “She goes, ‘Sure!’ ” Abedin says. No matter that Grégoire Trudeau was in a pantsuit, nor that Abedin was wearing tweed. The women arrived to a scene that Abedin likens to Lotus, the mid-’90s haunt that turned the Meatpacking District into a bass-thumping destination. Bouncers waved them in. The room was so thronged with bodies in cutout dresses that Abedin soon lost track of her friend. “I was panicking,” Abedin says. “I’m thinking, Oh, my God, this is one of her first trips and she doesn’t have security.” Twelve weeks prior, Grégoire Trudeau had been among the most recognizable de facto first ladies on the planet. Michelle Obama had once called her a “soulmate.” Now she had gone missing?
But then “three seconds later,” Grégoire Trudeau sent Abedin a selfie with the supermodel Helena Christensen, whom Grégoire Trudeau had met earlier that night. The two had folded themselves into the back seat of a pedicab and were rocketing uptown. Wrapped in a blanket of indeterminate cleanliness, Grégoire Trudeau tapped out: “We’re cozy and happy! Big kiss.” It was 2 a.m.
Weeks later, Grégoire Trudeau—whose normal bedtime is a respectable 10:30 p.m.—is laughing as she recounts the misadventure. Theroux was a fine host. But when Sophie Grégoire Trudeau wants out, there’s no stopping her. “I’m like a wild horse in a stall,” she explains. “Sometimes I just want to run in a field.” If she and her children are crammed in somewhere, one of her preferred modes of maternal embarrassment is to neigh as loud as she can.
Grégoire Trudeau and I had made plans to meet in the sleepy Canadian capital city of Ottawa, where she has lived since Trudeau was elected in 2015. It is known for government functions and not much else. I arrive at Le Germain Hôtel Ottawa hotel 20 minutes ahead of schedule, hoping to scope out a quiet place for us to sit—but no sooner do I walk in than I see Grégoire Trudeau, 48, draining a cup of tea at the bar. A friend of hers had warned me about this: Before her then husband was elected, Grégoire Trudeau was a newscaster. She does not get beaten to the punch.
No traces of anchor chilliness remain, and Grégoire Trudeau wraps me in a big hug before we sit down. She’s wearing a denim jumpsuit and a pair of wedge snow boots from one of the most trusted brands north of Lake Superior—La Canadienne. In the 36 hours I spend in her nation’s capital, it sleets, rains, hails, and snows. She peeks at our feet and smiles. Rookie mistake: I had worn loafers.
We settle into a cordoned-off area of the restaurant, and before I can formulate a single question, Grégoire Trudeau has one for me: Have I read her forthcoming memoir, Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other? I have: It’s her first book (she will also publish a children’s book in 2025) and the culmination of months of scribbling on the margins of her old life. She wrote it at the dinner table and at her desk. She wrote it on her iPad with the children at her elbow. She wrote and submitted it before she knew she and Trudeau would separate, which explains the fact that there is not one mention of the breakup in the book.
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.
She felt trapped. Grégoire Trudeau had had to give up her career when Trudeau became prime minister. Her cousin still bristles at the warped expectations. Justin Trudeau had been heralded as a champion of working women. When his own wife wanted to contribute, she was pilloried. His ascent cost her her profession. “She was put in an impossible position,” a Canadian journalist tells me. “She was just stuck.”
The uproar shocked Grégoire Trudeau, too. “It was like, ‘Really?’ ” she says now. She has since made her peace with what happened. “You do what you want with that nonofficial title,” she continues. “I already had a connection with the public, and I’m not naive. But here’s what I’ve realized: There is life, and then there’s what you read in the media. When I travel the country, I get love and support.”
Grégoire Trudeau doesn’t call the outrage sexist, but those close to her do. Someone who has remained friends with both Sophie and Prime Minister Trudeau fumes that we “just don’t recognize the amount of work that the support person has to do in order for the ‘main character’ to do their job.” This isn’t some high-minded feminist theorizing. It’s a simple fact: “He wouldn’t have been able to become prime minister without her.”
Trudeau was reelected in October 2019. The pandemic broke out less than six months later. Tom Hanks became one of the most famous people to fall ill on March 11. Grégoire Trudeau announced that she had contracted the virus 48 hours later. (The media traced her infection to an event in London, which she attended with the actor Idris Elba and the race car driver Lewis Hamilton. Grégoire Trudeau remains convinced she contracted it at a food court.)
The government started operating out of Rideau Cottage, the prime minister’s residence. Grégoire Trudeau was shepherding her young children through their schooling while living in what had become a bustling new national headquarters. Trudeau passed a slew of COVID measures, some more popular than others. Grégoire Trudeau had friends who were furious about the government response. “We weren’t all reacting the same way,” she says. “And so many people were directing their anger at the person who was holding office.” Over those tense months, Grégoire Trudeau watched several of her own relationships fracture. “We had real arguments,” she says.
When the pandemic receded, Trudeau won a third term, but the mood was grim. An anti-vaccine protest trundled across Canada and converged on Ottawa. It became so aggressive that, at one point, it was reported that Trudeau had to be moved to an undisclosed location for his own protection. No wonder Grégoire Trudeau started working on a book about resilience. The Canadian doctor and trauma expert Gabor Maté met her around that time. Grégoire Trudeau was interested in his recent book The Myth of Normal, and she asked him to lunch in 2022. He left with the keen impression that she was “chafing at the bit.”
“I sensed that it was somewhat of a challenge for her to be in the political and diplomatic world of Ottawa, which demands a lot of good behavior, fitting in with expectations, dealing with other people’s projections,” Maté says. “She wanted to be herself and to be free and not to be constrained.” When he saw the news months later that she and Trudeau had split, well: “It was no surprise to me that she withdrew from that role.”
In our conversation, Grégoire Trudeau sidesteps timelines and breaking points. It was public knowledge that she and Trudeau saw a couples therapist. In his own memoir in 2014, Trudeau alluded to “difficult ups and downs” in their marriage. When I press her to tell me what fueled the decision to separate, Grégoire Trudeau muses on the value of attributing cause and effect: “Is it my fault? Is it his fault? There’s a lot of blaming, when what we’re all trying in our relationships and our connections is to heal ourselves or validate our emotions.”
She summons a notion borrowed from therapist Perel. “So many people have been trained to end a relationship before questioning its structure,” Grégoire Trudeau says. “This is a sign of our emotional and relational immaturity. It’s still black or white, married or divorced. But the modern family is reorganizing.” And what is a breakup if not a reorg? For what it’s worth, Grégoire Trudeau continues to “believe in long-term relationships” and “perseverance.” I gather that she means: She and Trudeau will continue to have a relationship, even if it’s not a romantic one.
Still, it’s not all Zen acceptance. Grégoire Trudeau struggles, too. “I think it hurts me for the kids,” she says. She worries about the “emotional heritage” that she’s passing down to them. Can she orchestrate this restructuring from a traditional nuclear fivesome to something more flexible and experimental without causing them distress?
So far, she has eased through the transition as best as she can. Grégoire Trudeau continues to live part-time in Rideau Cottage. She has her own “little place” as well, she explains, not too far from the compound. In the immediate aftermath of the announcement, the Trudeaus went on summer vacation together. Christmas was spent as a unit, too. “We don’t even have a parental sharing plan,” Grégoire Trudeau admits. The realities of Trudeau’s job require a flexible arrangement. “We go along with the kids’ schedules, and we keep each other posted.”
There will be no clean break, which is how she wants it. “You can heal without hatred, without division, without blame,” she says. “I’m not perfect,” she adds. “It takes two to tango, and I think we both acknowledge that.”
In the hours we spend together, Grégoire Trudeau tears up at least four times. She keeps her emotions close to the surface, where she can reach for them. “Sometimes she has no filter,” says Sacha Laliberté, a director in Montreal. He and Grégoire Trudeau went out on a few dates in their 20s before deciding to be friends. It turned out to be a good bet. The relationship has endured.
When Trudeau decided to run for prime minister, Laliberté recalls Grégoire Trudeau assuring him that she could handle the pressure. He shrugs now: “I believed her.”
“Look, French Canadians—we’re weird,” says the French Canadian journalist Liz Plank, who has known Grégoire Trudeau since 2018 and spoke to her at length for Closer Together. “It’s like Celine Dion. She’s glamorous and amazing and fabulous, but she’s also kind of weird. That’s one of the things I love about Sophie. She is a true original.”
Grégoire Trudeau has put her stamp on the residence. The kids’ drawings paper the walls. Like the house on Harrington Lake where the Trudeaus go to unwind, it has been kitted out to support her particular brand of fun. One former overnight guest confirms that Grégoire Trudeau convinced her to take a cold plunge at 11 p.m. The weekend before our interview, Grégoire Trudeau tells me she coaxed a houseful of people into the “half-frozen lake” at the cottage. The paddleboards and canoes beckoned. A glass of wine helped her make the case. Her children joke that her motto is a cheerful “Safety last!” When she refers to their father as “very intrepid,” it’s said with a rush of affection. Long before the separation, Grégoire Trudeau rode around Ottawa on a Vespa.
Abedin, who met Grégoire Trudeau at the Toronto Film Festival in 2022, calls her friend a “vault”—someone with whom she can share “deep fears, secrets, aspirations.” At least once, Grégoire Trudeau has coached her through breathing exercises over the phone. The women understand each other, not least because Abedin knows the particular pain of divorce and co-parenting under the microscope.
“I do think she and I had that connection of, ‘I know what that’s like,’ ” says Abedin. “I know what it’s like when you’re cast in the public light as a plus-one to whoever your partner is. And then to branch out on your own—it does feel like a whole new life. What she did was courageous. She chose herself.”
In the wake of the separation, rumors spread that Grégoire Trudeau was already in another relationship. “I am much less interested in gossip than I was as a teenager. I just think it’s a complete waste of time, and I wish people the best,” she says, after I ask her about them. But later, she softens when we circle back to the prospect of future romance: “My answer is I’m a human being.”
Grégoire Trudeau insists she doesn’t see herself “any differently” now than she did before the announcement. “I see my situation differently,” she says. “I think it’s important for every woman out there to have a sense of independence, to have a sense that without a partner, we can regulate our own selves, that we can be that good parent. I can’t say I’ve resolved all of that.”
She has settled on paths as a metaphor for the sustained relationship she hopes to have with Trudeau. “Instead of having the same path, it’s parallel paths,” she says. “Parallel paths while having a family is possible when there’s love and respect. You can still nourish each other in different ways.”
It’s a perspective she could only fully arrive at after their legal framework was settled. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen separation papers, but it’s nothing to bring people together,” Grégoire Trudeau says later. “It’s divisive. And of course, the law is there to protect the vulnerable, and it’s very important. But there’s no philosophical component in there that asks us to slow down. What is the future of care for one another?”
In 2025, Trudeau will be up for reelection. I ask Grégoire Trudeau, who has started her own communications company, whether she’s considered if she will participate in that race. The two share the same values. He is her candidate—and her ex. Would she hit the trail for him?
“I am concerned and acutely interested in our future,” she replies after a tiny pause. She sounds more like a political spouse than she has at any other point in the hours we spend together. “But then again, I can only do what I can to help. I know how I can give, and that’s what I’m going to focus on.”
Toward the end of our second conversation, it occurs to me that I’m not sure how to refer to her in this profile. On the cover of Closer Together, her name is printed as Sophie Grégoire Trudeau. In the past, some news outlets have dropped Grégoire altogether or combined Grégoire and Trudeau with a hyphen. She never changed her name when she married, so it’s all convention. No paperwork.
She goes back and forth for several minutes, wondering whether this is a question for her agent or publicist. But then she decides that such matters of existential reckoning are her call. She blesses the double-barreled last name. For now.
In Closer Together, Grégoire Trudeau writes of the “quick assessments” to which people have subjected her throughout her decades of public life. She’s that anchor. That TV host. When she’s dressed up, she knows she looks familiar.
“Sometimes I’d be asked if I was ‘Trudeau’s wife,’ ” Grégoire Trudeau writes. She learned to respond with a disarming smile: “I’m Sophie.”
Hair, Marilisa Sears; Makeup, Jodi Urichuk. Produced by PLUTINO GROUP. Set Design: Christine Brant.