Former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon worried she was being “too open” in her recent memoir, she reveals in a TV interview to be shown on Thursday.
Ms Sturgeon published her memoir “Frankly” this summer, discussing her life and her time in politics and at Bute House.
In it, she discusses issues from her conflict with her predecessor, the late Alex Salmond, to rumours of a lesbian affair and her resignation in 2023.
The book, for which Ms Sturgeon received a £300,000 advance, has received mixed reviews, including claims she was less than “frank” on a number of topics.
But speaking on BBC Scotland series The Big Scottish Book Club tonight, Ms Sturgeon tells how she thought perhaps she had been “too open”.
She said: “I first remember thinking ‘I’d love to write a book’ when I was probably about five, because I loved reading. I love books and have done all my life, but I never thought really seriously that I would one day write a memoir.
“I think it took me a while to feel that I was opening up as much as I wanted to and that I was actually getting under the skin of how things felt, not just the bare facts of what happened.
“I hope I’ve done that. Of course, now as I start to think about talking about it and putting it out in the world, I’m thinking maybe I’ve been too open.”
In the interview, recorded last month, she tells how she read novels when she was First Minister as a means of escaping the stress and hectic nature of the job.
Scotland’s longest-serving First Minister, she insisted political leaders everywhere should be forced to read fiction to “make them more empathetic and understanding”.
Ms Sturgeon, long known for her love of books, also spoke of the books that have helped shape her life.
Her all-time favourite read, she said, was Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 Scots classic Sunset Song, set in the north east of Scotland during World War II.
She said: “It was the book that really ignited my love of literature. There was a central character, a young girl who was really struggling between her desire to go off to university and learn and the pull of the community she had grown up in, and I was going through something similar at that point as well.
“So I had that same kind of, I suppose, inner conflict of wanting to spread your wings but wanting to sort of stay where I was. So it really spoke to me at the time.”
She said she was also a “big fan” of the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and had recently finished reading Taylor Jenkins Reid’s new novel Atmosphere, a tear-jerker love story set around the space programme in the US in the late 1970s and the first female astronauts.
She added: “We all need things in our lives, particularly when things are hectic and busy and stressful, to allow us just to take a step back. And for me that’s always been reading.
“I probably read more when I was First Minister, when I had so little time to do it, than I do now, when I’ve got arguably more time on my hands.
“I’ve got this kind of maybe naive view of the world that all political leaders should be forced to read fiction to make them more empathetic, understanding people.
“So that’s how it’s been important to me and I think it always will be.”
* The Big Scottish Book Club is on BBC Scotland, tonight (Thursday 11 Sept) at 10.30pm.
