A tough cookie, but one with a vulnerable side

Denise Bombardier has achieved fame on a level rarely seen for a journalist

Last week, I said I was going to write about Quebec journalist and author Denise Bombardier. Promise made, promise kept. Who doesn’t know that she’s one of Quebec’s most fearless freethinkers, an intellectual powerhouse, a bestselling author as well as a pop-culture icon? An intellectual version of Barbara Walters. Her autobiography, Une vie sans peur et sans regret, which came out on Oct. 22 is already on its third printing. More than a personal memoir, it’s a history of Quebec since the Quiet Revolution by someone who watched it unfold from the front row and sometimes from the centre of the storm. For the sake of transparency, I will also mention that she is a close friend. Bombardier has been on our TV screens since 1958, when, an aspiring actress, she landed a role in a téléroman at 17. While her appetite for knowledge outgrew her artistic ambitions, she has achieved fame on a level rarely seen for a journalist. Today, at 77, she remains one of the most active journalists and authors in the French-speaking world. In France, she is a top-rated commentator, author and polemicist. (Denise, you’ll see later on, likes a good fight.) She earned her doctorate in sociology from La Sorbonne in Paris in 1974 and has remained close to la mère-patrie ever since. “France made me as a writer,” she writes. The Parisian version of “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” She has published 21 novels and essays to date, all bestsellers, including a sociological analysis of Céline Dion after travelling with her for a year on the 2008 Taking Chances world tour. Bombardier’s work has earned her prestigious prizes, awards and decorations: l’Ordre du Québec, the Order of Canada, Chevalier, elevated to Officier, de l’Ordre de la Légion d’honneur, which she received from French president François Mitterrand. Madame B. was the first woman to host a public affairs television show in Quebec, Noir sur blanc, a pre-eminent stop on the political talk show circuit from 1979 to 1983. In her 30 years hosting public affairs shows on Radio-Canada, she interviewed the major figures of her time, from René Lévesque to Golda Meir. In 1985, she published a semi-autobiographical novel, Une enfance à l’eau bénite (a childhood in holy water), the life of an ambitious young woman in the clutches of the Catholic Church before the Quiet Revolution. It explains so much about Quebecers’ attitude to religion. The book launched her career in France, but it was in 1990 that Bombardier became a household name, accusing celebrated writer Gabriel Matzneff of pedophilia during Apostrophes, a popular literary TV show. Matzneff was promoting a memoir in which he described sodomizing underage children. The other guests remained silent, some laughed at his tales, except Bombardier who, when her turn came to speak, calmly tore into Matzneff with courage and impeccable logic. Did somebody say “cultural earthquake?” In her autobiography, she comes across as a tough cookie, a fearless female, but also as a vulnerable human being. The pages dedicated to her ill-fated passionate relationship with Lucien Bouchard, when he was Canadian ambassador in Paris, are worth the price of the book alone. These days, she is a fellow columnist at Le Journal de Montréal. She’s on Quebecor’s new venture, QUB Radio. She’s on LCN. She’s on CBC. She has a podcast. She’s everywhere. Miami, Paris, North Hatley, The Pas, Casablanca, Las Vegas. Name it, she’s been there. Or will soon. She’s married to an Englishman, historian James Jackson, who taught French and Quebec literatures at Trinity College in Dublin, before they met at a seminar in Belfast. Guillaume Sylvestre, her only son from a previous marriage, is a celebrated documentary filmmaker. But the sweetest spot in her life right now is her first granddaughter, Rose, who’s just about to walk and talk and, who knows, one day, write and debate as eloquently as her grandmother.