Unreliable Boyfriend: An Insider's View of Dealing with a Chaotic Superpower, Plutocrats, and Other Complicated People

Summary

Unreliable Boyfriend is a book that only Chrystia Freeland could write—about a globe-trotting journalist who covered oligarchs and then became a political leader; what she learned about power, international relations, and global trade from her years in government; and how the United States can be seen in revelatory ways through the eyes of a Canadian who had to deal with American chaos.

Unreliable Boyfriend is a different kind of political memoir: a candid, deeply personal account of power, politics, and globalization from an unlikely insider—a five-foot-one journalist turned Deputy Prime Minister who now turns her reportorial eye on her own life, her battles with authoritarians and plutocrats, and the fragile future of liberal democracy.

Before rising to the heights of Canadian politics, Chrystia Freeland was one of the first Western reporters to chronicle the rise of the Russian oligarchs in the 1990s. She spent decades reporting from Moscow, Kyiv, Washington, Beijing, and beyond, exposing how global elites and authoritarian regimes exploited economic upheaval while hollowing out the lives of ordinary people.

Then she crossed into politics herself.

Inside Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Freeland became one of the world’s most influential negotiators, helping broker trade agreements that united labor activists and business leaders, nationalists and globalists. At a moment of rising tariffs, economic anxiety, and democratic instability, she offers a rare insider account of how deals are really made—and how coalitions fracture when governments fail to deliver for working people.

Part polemic, part memoir, Unreliable Boyfriend is the story of a globe-trotting journalist who brought the lessons she learned covering dissidents and oligarchs into the halls of power—only to encounter a new generation of plutocrats, this time in the West itself.

Freed from the constraints of office, Freeland writes with unusual candor about leadership, ambition, compromise, and betrayal. She reveals how power operates behind closed doors, how alliances are forged and broken, and why trade, security, and democracy can no longer be separated. At a time when authoritarianism is resurging around the world, she argues that democracies must build new alliances strong enough to resist both foreign autocrats and homegrown oligarchs.

In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, Naomi Klein, and Samantha Power, Chrystia Freeland has written a searching and provocative account of life as both outsider and insider, journalist and politician, activist and policymaker—and as a Canadian who may understand America’s dangers, and possibilities, more clearly than many Americans themselves.