Nicola Sturgeon said she now thinks she may have been "too open" in her long-awaited memoir Frankly, in comments broadcast on BBC Scotland’s The Big Scottish Book Club.
Sturgeon, the former first minister of Scotland, told the programme she had struggled to strike the right balance between factual account and personal feeling while writing the book, which she said she had wanted to write since childhood. The memoir, which went on sale this year and for which she received a reported £300,000 advance, has prompted a wide-ranging public debate and drawn criticism from political opponents and public figures.
Frankly recounts Sturgeon’s conflict with her predecessor Alex Salmond, meetings with the late Queen and her upbringing in Ayrshire. Critics have said the book omits or glosses over several contentious episodes from her time in office. Among the grievances aired publicly has been the deletion of Covid-era WhatsApp messages, perceived failures in education policy, problems with the CalMac ferry network and the disappearance of campaign funds — issues highlighted in a strongly worded review by author J.K. Rowling.
Rowling wrote that Sturgeon was "flat out Trumpian in her shameless denial of reality and hard facts," and said readers would search in vain in Frankly for candid accounts of the vanished WhatsApp messages, falling educational outcomes, the CalMac ferry disaster and missing funds. The criticism followed other rows over passages dealing with Alex Salmond.
Sturgeon’s portrait of Salmond in the memoir prompted anger among his family. She wrote that Salmond opposed gay marriage, had not read the independence white paper and repeated rumours about past consensual affairs. Salmond’s family said they were united behind his widow, Moira, in reviving a legal action against SNP ministers that Salmond had pursued in 2023, a move his supporters described at the time as part of a wider campaign to challenge those he said had wronged him.
On the BBC Scotland programme, Sturgeon said she had aimed to move beyond a chronological catalogue of events and to convey how episodes felt to her, and that as she prepared to discuss the book publicly she wondered whether she had been too revealing. She also discussed her long-standing engagement with literature, naming Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel Sunset Song as a formative read and describing the central character’s struggle as echoing her own early tensions about leaving home to study.
Sturgeon told the show she believed fiction could foster empathy in political leaders, saying she had a "maybe naive view" that leaders should be required to read fiction to become more understanding. The Big Scottish Book Club episode was scheduled to air on BBC Scotland on Thursday at 10:30 p.m.
The memoir’s publication has reopened debates about the record of Sturgeon’s time in office, the transparency of government communication during the pandemic and the handling of allegations and disputes within the SNP. Supporters of Sturgeon have defended her account as a personal reflection and a contribution to public understanding, while critics have said it fails to grapple fully with the difficult questions raised during and after her leadership.