When the title of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoir, Frankly, was first announced, I had my doubts. Partly, of course, it was a touching nod to her late friend, the comic Janey Godley. Godley’s viral Twitter voiceovers of the first minister of Scotland’s press conferences always ended with the catchphrase: “Frank, get the door!”

As a reporter covering her decade in power, however, I’d always found her to be a master of the lengthy, lawyerly obfuscation and the disarming but consequence-free apology. Would she really engage with the questions that overshadowed the final years of her leadership until her shock resignation in 2023? Questions about Alex Salmond’s sexual harassment investigation, the Scottish government’s secrecy during the pandemic, the toxic legacy of her gender recognition reforms, the stalled delivery of some of her flagship policy pledges, not to mention independence itself. And what about that rumoured lesbian affair?

With her ex-husband, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell, currently awaiting trial for alleged embezzlement of party funds, that topic is rendered conveniently off-limits under contempt of court rules. But that doesn’t mean readers will be able to dispel from their minds images of the famous blue police tent planted in her garden. Following her own arrest and release without charge in June 2023, she remained subject to investigation as part of the probe into SNP finances for almost two years. This book was written during those dark days (she was formally told there would be no further action in March this year).

But first, Frankly takes us back to a council flat in the former mining village of Dreghorn, Ayrshire. There, a young Nicola identified with tomboyish George from the Famous Five, worried constantly about her dad joining the swelling ranks of the unemployed, and broke up with her primary school best friend because she wanted to spend more time on her homework. She identifies the fundamental contradiction that would propel her: “Alongside shyness, crippling lack of confidence and a dreadful fear of failure was a burning ambition, a drive to succeed, a craving to be ‘seen’.”

It’s a psychic schism that is evident throughout the book. When she starts canvassing as a teenager, “somehow the girl who found it almost impossible to chat with people she knew was able to stand on the doorsteps of complete strangers and ask them to vote SNP”. And later, as Sturgeon and her party soared in popularity after the 2014 independence referendum, she became “scared that my public persona was now so far removed from my private self that I wouldn’t be able to live up to her”. One is left in no doubt about the sheer force of will required to be Nicola Sturgeon, and how very good she became at hiding that struggle.

There are some moments of bracing honesty. She reveals she came close to having a breakdown after giving evidence at the UK Covid inquiry. It was intolerable to her “being confronted with everything my worst critics wanted people to believe of me”. I can’t think of another politician of her stature who’d describe themselves on the floor of their home office, gripped by a panic attack as they struggled to edit a crucial policy document – in this case the Scottish government’s white paper on independence. And a lengthy passage on her pregnancy loss, in which she writes about her lingering guilt and shares the name she had chosen for the baby, Isla, is almost unbearably intimate.

As you might expect from a book-lover like Sturgeon, she is an entertaining storyteller, with a good eye for detail – such as the relief she felt on discovering a dead fly in her restaurant meal at her first SNP conference, meaning she didn’t have to pay for it from the £40 her cash-strapped parents had given her to last the weekend. She also enjoys a plot twist: after a thorough take-down of the much-recycled rumour that she had an affair with the female French ambassador, she writes that “the nature of the insult was water off a duck’s back … I have never considered sexuality, my own included, to be binary”.

It’s startling to read her account of the tension and hostility she claims characterised her relationship with Alex Salmond long before the public split that resulted from her government’s handling of sexual harassment allegations made against him by two civil servants. (These later formed part of his criminal trial on 13 counts of sexual assault, of which he was acquitted in March 2020.) The pattern of behaviour she lays out – bouncing her into standing for parliament before she felt ready, overriding her concerns about releasing the Lockerbie bomber on compassionate grounds, taunting her about her caution on pushing for another independence referendum – comes across as little short of bullying.

Of course this cannot be tested against Salmond’s own recollection because of his sudden death last October, and will further infuriate those who believe those sexual assault allegations were a conspiracy confected by Sturgeon and her allies, a theory she takes apart piece by piece.

She says she “agonised” about “stirring up pain for his wife and family” but concluded “I cannot let what he said stand unchallenged”. It’s a trade-off that makes sense from someone who recognises what an “increasingly polarising figure” she had become – indeed anything she writes now will be understood from whichever side of the various fissures readers locate themselves on, be they Scottish independence, Alex Salmond or gender.

On that issue she also stands her ground: where plenty of others have shifted position since the supreme court ruling on biological sex, she refuses to, while offering her most conciliatory words yet over her “complacency” about other women’s worries. What’s clear is the utter discombobulation she felt at having been earlier feted as a role model – “living up to the honour of being the first female incumbent of my office became almost an obsession”, she writes – only to be decried by some gender critical campaigners as a “destroyer of women’s rights”.

At one point, Sturgeon observes that “whenever a man is alleged to have done something wrong some people’s first instinct is to find a woman to blame”. Right enough, but there are also legitimate questions about how someone in a position of power and leadership could be so ignorant of someone as close to her as Salmond was. Neither does she explain why the women who brought the original harassment complaints against Salmond described being left without any support by the Scottish government she led.

She fails to reflect on how having a married couple at the very top of the SNP for more than a decade impacted the party, encouraging the apparently lax governance so many colleagues complained about. She says she “hated” the cultish focus on her as an individual, particularly after 2015, but doesn’t explain why it was allowed to continue. Nor does she address the lack of succession planning for her eventual departure.

Despite the book’s promise of candour, it seems like Sturgeon is only willing to entertain her readers’ curiosity so far. She writes latterly that “even if I haven’t changed anyone else’s view of me, the process of writing this book has helped me arrive at a more balanced sense of myself”. That may be so, but it doesn’t feel like the whole story.