PARIS (AFP) – France’s scorned former first lady Valerie Trierweiler is set to lift the lid on her relationship with President Francois Hollande this week in what could prove an explosive memoir, media reports said Tuesday.
Trierweiler, a 49-year-old journalist, was dumped unceremoniously by Hollande in January after a magazine revealed his affair with actress Julie Gayet, and has since remained broadly silent about an event she once said had felt like falling “from a skyscraper.”
According to parliamentary news channel LCP, the book about her relationship with Hollande will come out on Thursday and will be called “Thank You For This Moment.”
Brigitte Boucher, the reporter who broke the news, said that the president “is not spared” in the book. Les Arenes, the publishing company behind the book, refused to comment when contacted by AFP.
Trierweiler met Hollande in the mid 2000′s while he was in a relationship with Segolene Royal — herself a former presidential candidate — and the pair began a secret liason.
Hollande subsequently left Royal, the mother of his four children, for Trierweiler.
News of his affair with 42-year-old Gayet caused shockwaves in France, and Trierweiler was hospitalised for a week after Closer published pictures of Hollande arriving for secret trysts with the actress at a borrowed flat.
Hollande then announced their relationship was over in an 18-word statement that was devoid of regret or remorse for the woman he had described as “the love of my life” in 2010.
“Eighteen words is almost one word for each month we spent together since he was elected,” she told Le Parisien daily in January, describing herself as “more disappointed than hurt”.
At the time, Trierweiler had threatened to lift the lid on bed-hopping and back-stabbing at the top of the French state, and the book could prove an embarrassment for Hollande, whose approval ratings are already at a record low.
Her memoir will not be the first by a former first lady.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s ex-wife Cecilia Attias, who was a key advisor in his successful 2007 campaign but divorced him soon after, also published an autobiography last year, which sold tens of thousands of copies.
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