The First Lady Next Door: A Canadian’s Memoir of Iceland, Identity, and Unexpected Adventure

By Eliza Reid

Simon & Schuster, April 2026/336 pages

Reviewed by Maureen Boyd

May 24, 2026

Eliza Reid’s The First Lady Next Door: A Canadian’s Memoir of Iceland, Identity, and Unexpected Adventure captures all that and more in a memoir that is funny, candid, thoughtful and, above all, self-aware.

Reid writes of her loving and happy childhood growing up first in Kanata, a suburb in Ottawa’s west end, and then suddenly moving to a farm in “the sticks” just outside Ottawa where she was decidedly ‘unsporty’ and uncool. High school improved.

She studied at University of Toronto’s Trinity College, where she was elected Head of School. After Trinity, she studied international relations at Oxford, where she met Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, the only Icelandic student in the program. They moved to Iceland, where he taught at university.

Reid navigated expat life, found and lost a job, learned Icelandic (no easy feat), created a career writing and reporting, co-founded the Iceland Writers Retreat and became a mother of four young children.

Then, within the space of a few hectic weeks, her “bookish professorial husband” leapt into the race for — and was elected — president of Iceland. Reid became first lady.

To some it would be a fairy tale; to others a nightmare. For Reid, it meant figuring out her place. “I wanted to leave a legacy, to be able to look back on this all-to-brief moment and know that I had done everything I could, the way I wanted to do it. But what way was that?”

Over the next eight years, she carved out a role where there was no how-to manual but lots of unwritten rules and expectations of how she should act, dress and behave.

There were challenges, including an initial lack of briefing notes for public appearances, no biographies of the people, “no history of the community, the challenges they were facing…”.  Aware that what most people only knew about her was that she was “from Canada, spoke Icelandic and had a lot of children”, she realized that how she looked in public helped form a perception.

Nonetheless, she spent “far too much emotional energy worrying about attire and how I could afford it” and, on occasion, wore Red Cross second hand clothing to send a message.

Always the volunteer-in-chief, Reid bounced from meeting heads of state to hosting receptions to giving keynote speeches while arranging pickups and play dates for her children: “a 24/7 mix of the personal and the public, the professional and the political.”

Within the space of a few hectic weeks, her ‘bookish professorial husband’ leapt into the race for — and was elected — president of Iceland. Reid became first lady.

Throughout, Reid talks about the need to adapt and reinvent – she broadens the theme to anyone finding their voice in a situation they didn’t expect. But in her case, it was about being ‘the trailing spouse’ – a situation faced by some men but overwhelmingly by women who make the decision to put their spouse’s career choice first.  How to adapt and reinvent yourself, whether in a new city or country, new career or non-career is what the author explores.

Reid focused on “activities that would have a ‘what next’ … through connecting groups with Icelandic counterparts or sharing some of the new knowledge” from her visits abroad. Given her previous work with Icelandic tourism and business development, she became a UN Special Ambassador for tourism and sustainable development goals as well as a special ambassador of SOS Children’s Villages Iceland. She reached out to other spouses of heads of state, wrangling a meeting with both Jill Biden and then President Biden.

There were annoyances: guests ignoring her outstretched hand in receiving lines, not being named in photo captions, and other microaggressions which led her to write that she was not “my husband’s handbag” in the New York Times op-ed I’m a First lady and It’s an Incredibly Weird Job.

Always a gender advocate, her new life brought opportunities to highlight gender equality.

It’s a theme reflected throughout Reid’s writing. My book club introduced me to her first book, Secrets of the Sprakkar: Iceland’s Extraordinary Women and How They Are Changing the World.  In Secrets of the Sprakkar, Reid takes us on a tour of Iceland, where we meet women making a difference. Iceland has topped the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index for 16 years, as the only economy to have closed more than 90% of its overall gender gap. Reid celebrates Iceland’s legislative support of paid parental leave and affordable childcare but points out the challenges that remain.

Reid’s fiction debut, Death on the Island, is a fast-paced ‘forced proximity’ style whodunit involving the murder of a Canadian diplomat on the remote Westman Islands. As the spouse of a former career diplomat,  I loved the premise and was well rewarded. As Stewart Wheeler, a former Canadian Ambassador to Iceland, wrote, its “smooth style welcomes you to the windswept islands and captures you with its quirky local characters. Her conjuring of plot twists and diplomatic realities had me wondering what I would have done in different situations.”

It’s written in the voice of the wife of the Canadian Ambassador to Iceland who, after her husband is one of those accused of murder, bravely and smartly investigates the case.

It includes some delightfully snarky comments about her supporting role as “mother, wife, traveler, companion, featureless spouse” to her husband’s work: “Of course, Graeme had no idea how patronizing his various ‘little tips’ came across. (What a relief when the term mansplaining entered the lexicon.)”

Death on the Island has been optioned for a television adaptation, and a sequel is promised. Non-fiction, mystery and memoir, Eliza Reid’s books are bestsellers. The first lady next door has found both her voice and her audience.

Maureen Boyd, C.M. has lived in Canada and abroad, working in politics, the media, at Rideau Hall, in government and, at times, as the ‘trailing spouse’.