A Formidable Presence

It can be fascinating to see the gap between how people perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others. By all appearances, Lise Bissonnette is a formidable presence, whether as a reporter, an editor, a novelist, or an administrator. While deeply charming, she is known to be imperious, writing with a pen that can draw blood and responding to anything she finds fatuous or ill-informed with a devastating retort. “I have often been described as an authoritarian person,” she concedes to the historian Pascale Ryan in a new book of interviews. “I would qualify that with a nuance, saying clearly that I am not ‘non-directive.’ I do not at all have the disposition to live in what they call ‘flat organigrams,’ where there is perfect equality of functions. I believe in a line of authority, and it turns out that I am not afraid to use it.”

Bissonnette has been in the public eye for nearly five decades, but perhaps her two most memorable moments came in the pages of...