A Different Kind of Power: A Memoir

by Jacinda Ardern Narrated by Jacinda Ardern

Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ¿ From the former prime minister of New Zealand, then the world's youngest female head of government and just the second to give birth in office, comes a deeply personal memoir chronicling her extraordinary rise and offering inspiration to a new generation of leaders.

“A clear and compelling case for compassion . . . an implicit repudiation of the strongman style of leadership that has taken hold around the world.”-The Washington Post

What if we could redefine leadership? What if kindness came first? Jacinda Ardern grew up the daughter of a police officer in small-town New Zealand, but as the 40th Prime Minister of her country, she commanded global respect for her empathetic leadership that put people first. This is the remarkable story of how a Mormon girl plagued by self-doubt made political history and changed our assumptions of what a global leader can be.

When Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister at age thirty-seven, the world took notice. But it was her compassionate yet powerful response to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks, resulting in swift and sweeping gun control laws, that demonstrated her remarkable leadership. She guided her country through unprecedented challenges-a volcanic eruption, a major biosecurity breach, and a global pandemic-while advancing visionary new policies to address climate change, reduce child poverty, and secure historic international trade deals. She did all this while juggling first-time motherhood in the public eye.

Ardern exemplifies a new kind of leadership-proving that leaders can be caring, empathetic, and effective. She has become a global icon, and now she is ready to share her story, from the struggles to the surprises, including for the first time the full details of her decision to step down during her sixth year as Prime Minister.

Through her personal experiences and reflections, Jacinda is a model for anyone who has ever doubted themselves, or has aspired to lead with compassion, conviction, and courage. A Different Kind of Power is more than a political memoir; it's an insight into how it feels to lead, ultimately asking: What if you, too, are capable of more than you ever imagined?

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Against the backdrop of the braggadocio and threats that permeate today’s political discourse, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern uses her new memoir to make a clear and compelling case for compassion. . . . Her new book is an implicit repudiation of the strongman style of leadership that has taken hold around the world.”—The Washington Post

“A Different Kind of Power is the story of the forces that have shaped Jacinda Ardern and the intentional effort she has put into creating a new template for the next generation of leaders to follow. Ardern’s insightful and inspiring memoir challenges old definitions of strength and power by emphasizing the urgency of compassion and kindness. World leaders have a lot to learn from her timely and important perspective.”—Melinda French Gates, author of The Moment of Lift

“Jacinda’s memoir gives us a rare glimpse into the foundations of her unique and unprecedented leadership style, one that values humanity above all else. It’s an essential, inspiring read in our current political climate.”—Natalie Portman

“It is rare enough to find someone who lives an inspiring life of genuine service to humanity; it is even rarer to find that they’ve written a beautiful book that will inspire others. Jacinda Ardern’s A Different Kind of Power is just such a book. I could not put down this deeply personal memoir by an icon who insists on being a real person. Like the memoirs of Barack Obama and Gloria Steinem, this book has the power to inspire a new generation of passionate leaders and readers. You don’t have to be interested in politics to devour this book; you might be interested in how women dare to mother and lead at the same time; you might be interested in bravery, and a life well-lived.”—Sarah Ruhl, author of Smile

“An honest, inviting and profoundly personal story of rising to power, and then choosing to give it up. This book is filled with humor, conviction, self-awareness, uncommon kindness, and a wisdom earned through the dizzying trials of recent history. This should be required reading for anyone trying to understand how—and why—to stay true to core values in trying times. A rare and essential memoir.”—Ben Rhodes, author of The World As It Is and After the Fall

“[Ardern] offers several fascinating peeks behind the curtain of her administration [in] an inspiring . . . glimpse at the rise and philosophy of a consequential politician.”—Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

2025-04-16
Thoughtful memoir by the former prime minister of New Zealand.

Ardern’s story opens at a nervous crossroads: She may or may not be on the verge of assuming the leadership of her country, depending on the entanglements of parliamentary backroom brokering, and she may or may not be pregnant. It turns out that she both wins the job and is with child, which leads to the first of many critical moments she faces, with a sharp question raised: “Is it okay for the prime minister to take maternity leave while in office?” The scrutiny was already intense. At 37, Ardern was the country’s youngest leader in more than a century and a half, was a woman, was a leader of the leftist Labour Party—and, incidentally, was a lapsed Mormon. For all that, Ardern writes, in her first 100 days in office she and her team pushed through numerous reforms, including world-leading work on combating climate change, committing her country to carbon neutrality by 2050, “not because we want to…but because we have to.” No sooner did Ardern say those words than did news break of the Christchurch mass shootings of Muslim New Zealanders, which prompted changing gun laws that involved “debating the line between meaningful reform and onerous burden.” Add to that, soon after, the ravages of Covid-19. Thanks to a lockdown and general conformity to social distancing rules, New Zealand's life expectancy increased, Ardern notes. But even so, a swirl of online conspiracy theories fueled a kind of homegrown MAGA movement whose members even occupied Parliament, as if to ape the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack. It’s small wonder that Ardern resigned in 2023, a decision she relates with pained honesty about whether she had the will to continue in the job.

An account of life in the political trenches that is alternately inspiring and dispiriting.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940193456346
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/03/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

One

You could drive for thirty miles in the Kāingaroa Forest and wonder if there’s anything left on earth besides trees. That’s the view: radiata pines, each standing one hundred feet tall, in tidy gridlines that extend as far as the eye can see. The forest is as vast as it is dense: tree upon tree, row upon row, mile upon mile. The sameness is broken by only two things. First, the road carving through the shadowy landscape, and then the radiata shoots, popping up sporadically and defiantly. These smaller, wilding pines look like the Christmas trees of my childhood—joyful but a bit pathetic, each with just a few sparse branches, enough only for a single string of tinsel that will never quite hide the exposed trunk.

Although Kāingaroa is man-made—it’s the second-largest timber plantation in the Southern Hemisphere—it is easy to feel isolated there. It’s a forest that has been known to swallow up hunters and hikers who get lost among the pines. Damp mists are common, and light struggles to break through, especially after the sun dips behind the green peaks of the distant Te Urewera mountain range. Needles and cones collect on the forest floor, and the air is thick with the scent of resin and pine.

But an hour into the journey, just as you become certain you’ve reached the middle of nowhere, there is a break in the trees, and signs of human life return: A run-down forestry building with a rusted sign. A timber motel with small, neat rooms. Then, around the corner, a service station with three petrol pumps that marks the entry to a town called Murupara.

As a young girl, I made that trip through the forest countless times. Today, when I close my eyes, I can still take myself there: the long solitary stretch of tar seal, the gray mass of the ranges, rough trunks piercing the sky.

The first time I visited Murupara, I was four years old and unwell with the flu in the backseat of my family’s beige 1979 Toyota Corona. In those days, I was also prone to car sickness, which was almost certainly made worse by my corduroy booster seat, little more than a wedge of dense foam covered in fabric. It gave me height, but it also exaggerated every turn in the road. Next to me sat my sister Louise, just eighteen months older than me. She was also in a booster, and queasy, but not so much that she would stop asking questions of my parents: How much longer? Why can’t we stop? What if I need the toilet? We each held our stuffed bears, which, uncannily, we resembled. Mine, with a round friendly face, a squat body, and short limbs, was simply called Teddy. My sister’s bear, Cookie, was almost twice the length of mine with a lean body and long legs.

The windows were rolled down just enough that I could hang my fingers over the top and wiggle them in the open air. Beneath my dangling feet were the items that my mum made sure accompanied us on every long car trip: an old towel and an empty, half-gallon plastic ice cream container, in case we needed to throw up. She never threw anything away, and even this container would likely later be repurposed to store home-baked blueberry muffins. Between me and Louise, trapped inside a cardboard box with small holes at the top, sat the most uncomfortable passenger of all: our gray rescue cat, Norm. The sedative from the vet was wearing off as he pressed his face up against the top of the box, whiskers protruding through the holes.

It was moving day. We had left behind friends and family in the city of Hamilton, more than two hours to the northwest, because my dad had a new job, as the police sergeant in Murupara, a place I’d never seen.

Dad had grown up in a large family in Te Aroha, a farming community in the shadow of mountains along the Waihou River. Like every region in New Zealand, Te Aroha was settled first by Māori, who’d navigated their way from Polynesia in waka (canoes) using stars, ocean swells, and sea life as their guide. Māori tribes had lived on this land for hundreds of years. Legend had it that the great chief Kahu climbed to the peak of a mountain to orient himself and was so moved to see his home from this vantage point that he named it Te Muri-aroha-o-Kahu, te aroha-tai, te aroha-uta, meaning “the love of Kahu for those on the coasts and those on the land.” Now it’s known simply as Mount Te Aroha, the mountain of love.

My dad’s family ran a drain-laying business in Te Aroha, and Ardern and Sons had dug most of the drains in the area. As a boy, my dad had helped out, but when his family converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or what many know as Mormonism, Dad left home to attend the Mormon boarding school in Temple View. After a short stint working at a lead and zinc mine, he joined the New Zealand Police at age nineteen, serving first as a uniformed constable in Auckland and then in the Criminal Investigation Branch in Hamilton.

Dad stands five feet ten and has always looked young for his age, with thick, dark hair, which in those days he wore shaggy in the back with a cowlick at his forehead so he resembled Fonzie from Happy Days. He’s outgoing, but thoughtful, with a calm voice that I rarely heard raised. Even when New Zealand’s beloved rugby team, the All Blacks, was on television, Dad watched with a quiet intensity, leaping to his feet when he could no longer contain either his elation or disappointment.

Throughout my childhood, he took 10K runs. When he came home, he’d trade his running shoes for worn-out sheepskin slippers and settle into his La-Z-Boy chair to read the newspaper. Dad is happiest when he’s reading—especially about world history, Antarctic exploration, and the great explorer Ernest Shackleton.

Most of all, Dad was interested in people; he always wanted to know about their lives. As a police officer, he didn’t simply want to know what crimes had been committed; he also wanted to know why. I would often hear him say that the police can’t arrest their way out of everything. He believed if you wanted to fix crime, you had to understand why it was happening in the first place. He asked good questions, and people talked to him. It wasn’t unusual for someone my father was questioning to pause and observe, “At least you’re listening to me.” This isn’t to say he was soft. I doubt you could say that of anyone who investigated the sorts of crimes my dad did: homicides, rapes, robberies, and gang activities. He just looked at problems differently.

Policing in New Zealand is also different from that in many countries. For one, officers don’t routinely carry guns. And while they have the power to make arrests, they use a U.K. principle known as policing by consent. The idea that police are essentially citizens in uniforms, and their authority stems from the approval and cooperation of the community. Although there have been examples of abuse of power in New Zealand’s police force, policing by consent is the benchmark, the model that officers are expected to follow, and it was what my dad believed in.

In 1980, four years before our first family drive to Murupara, Dad began studying for the exam to become a detective constable. By then, he’d been married for several years, and my mum—a small-framed, high-energy woman with the practicality of someone raised on a dairy farm—was nine months into her second pregnancy. Mum vomited day in, day out. Being around food became such a chore that she began placing a plastic mat down on the kitchen floor, rolling my sister’s high chair over the top of it, setting the food on the tray of the chair, and leaving my sister to feed herself. Mum would peer around the doorframe, watching Louise from a far enough distance that she couldn’t smell the food but within reach if Louise needed her.

On the morning of Dad’s three-hour detective constable exam, a cold but sunny winter day, Mum wished him luck as he walked out the door. Dad wasn’t long gone when the urge to throw up hit Mum yet again. She rushed down the hall of their small weatherboard home to the bathroom. And that’s when it happened: Her water broke. There were no cell phones in those days and no way of contacting my dad quickly. Even if there were, I doubt my mother would have called him. She was determined that he finish his exam without “distraction,” which is a fairly understated way to refer to birth. Instead, she dialed my grandmother, asking her to come and get Louise; then she rang a neighbor with a large flatbed truck. When that vintage red truck pulled in to the driveway, my mother hauled herself up into it and asked the neighbor to drop her off at the hospital door. She’d be fine, she insisted.

That’s Mum: low fuss, straightforward, ready to get on with things—a classic Kiwi woman.

That day, when Dad finished his exam, there was a message waiting: Come to the hospital. He made it in time to welcome me into the world.

Dad enjoyed the work in Hamilton, and became a detective constable, but he wanted to run a station rather than just work in one. So, when I was a toddler, he began studying for his sergeant’s exams, which was no small effort. He already had a full-time job and a young family and was active in the Mormon church. To prepare, he rose before dawn, getting in an hour or two of study before the rest of us woke up. Then he would study again after dark.

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