Margaret Trudeau

I know what it's like to feel marginalized and defeated and humiliated by suffering from a mental illness.

I love the life I've had.

I have five of the most beautiful children.

I don't think Pierre Trudeau knew how to be a husband. I couldn't stay in that marriage.

I had to divorce my husband, the prime minister. I found it terribly overwhelming.

I tried during the 1974 campaign to show my husband not as the aloof intellectual people think he is, but the warm, passionate man I know. But the day after the election - after I'd worked so hard - I was put back on the shelf. I was devastated.

Politics is an ugly and thankless role.

I don't paint, and I can't draw, but I see things, I think, quite well, and I love being able to freeze things with the camera, particularly the children. Then I discovered with the camera that you can tell a whole story with just freezing a moment in reality. I find it a very good way, a very satisfying feeling.

I prepared myself for my marriage to Pierre Trudeau, but I didn't prepare myself for marriage to the prime minister.

I have studied Freud and that kind of thing. I just never thought I would need it.

The label 'wife of the prime minister' is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I'm a human being.

There's nothing antifeminist about showing a lovely body; it's part of the person you are.

I miss being exposed to the leading thinkers of the world.

I have worked hard to become happy. It was a real struggle.

I don't care about the respect of the press or the public or anybody. Whose respect every day I'm trying to garner is the respect of my children and my grandchildren and my friends, the people I work with.

Who am I - Canada's Rodney Dangerfield? I get no respect.

Everywhere I go, particularly when there's people who know me or recognize me, I get the warmest hugs and happiest sighs full of hope and full of relief.

I've had enough of being public property.

I just want to find my individuality.

I don't think I'm marriage material, to tell you the truth. I'd be a bad choice. But I'd be darling at being a girlfriend.