YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY: A Memoir of Discovery, by Gavin Newsom
What are we to make of Gavin Newsom?
In the space of a year, he has gone from being the scorned governor of California to, at least in the view of some of the nation’s most prominent political publications, the front-runner for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination. He can be both irritatingly slick and refreshingly resolute. And now, as his time in Sacramento draws to an end, Newsom has delivered a political memoir that tries to grapple with these contradictions and to correct what he views as inaccuracies in how he has been portrayed over the past two decades.
And not a bad book at that, certainly as compared with the long slog of sanitized and stultifying entries in this genre that I’ve endured over the years. “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery” checks the boxes of the conventional political memoir. There are the character-building tales of his parents’ broken marriage and his own failed romances, as well as anecdotes recounting his political successes. But Newsom’s life is fascinating enough that his story, rendered with the assistance of a ghostwriter, Mark Arax, clips along: from his struggles with dyslexia and alcohol to a safari with the billionaire Getty family to the searing memory of watching his cancer-stricken mother die by an act of assisted suicide.
It is built on a rather unconventional forensic examination of Newsom family history — including interviews he conducted with relatives — that at times verges on therapeutic self-analysis. In a quest for lessons from his family’s past that might explain his own bouts of self-destructive behavior, he traces its history back generations — to when his great-great-grandfather arrived on these shores from Ireland and became a police officer on the streets of San Francisco.
There are no headline-grabbing revelations here, in contrast to recent books from other 2028 prospects — notably Josh Shapiro, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania. Uncomfortable chapters of Newsom’s life are shaped and sanded for future inspection by voters and opponents alike. Even after reading his account, I remain at a loss as to how he ended up married for just over four years to Kimberly Guilfoyle, who later dated Donald Trump Jr. and whom President Trump picked as his ambassador to Greece.
There are precisely two mentions, both anodyne, of Kamala Harris, the former vice president and Newsom’s on-again-off-again California rival; he did not take the bait by responding to the slight slights she made against him in her memoir. In fact, with one big, obvious exception (Donald J. Trump), he avoids skewering fellow politicians.
As you would expect, this book is partly an exercise in self-inoculation: Newsom tells his story the way he wants it told — before his opponents try to use it to discredit him. He describes a widely reported romance with an aide, who was married to his deputy chief of staff when he was mayor of San Francisco, as “the stupidest and also briefest of affairs.” He confides that his mother’s mother went to Soviet Russia in the 1930s, “where she mixed it up with other young American Reds.”
He studied art history, once worked as a licensed real estate agent and, in the also-not-shocking department, was a student of Tony Robbins’s lessons on how to influence people. He talks about growing up with the Gettys (his father was a close childhood friend of Gordon Getty, the fourth child of the oil magnate J. Paul Getty). “We climbed aboard private jets and yachts and limos that whisked us to luxury hotels and royal palaces,” he writes, regaling us about the times he met Arthur Miller, Jack Nicholson and Luciano Pavarotti.
But Newsom resents the way he has been caricatured throughout his career: as the privileged Californian with the look-at-me Hollywood profile, who moves in wealthy and glamorous circles. This irritation, along with his attempt to change that perception, is an undercurrent of the book. “The press’s one-dimensional portrait of me pissed me off because I knew the way I grew up, the struggles my mother had to endure, the hard times that made my life a duality that never seemed to get its due, a duality I would spend years trying to comprehend.”
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Newsom relates early in this account how his father abandoned the family when Newsom was young, “for reasons that neither he nor my mother ever made clear.” His mother had to work three jobs to support her children, serving enchiladas and tostadas at a local restaurant.When Newsom first stumbled across the term “latchkey kids,” he thought, “Yeah, that was my sister and me.”
He always felt like the outsider, the “gimpy geek with a bowl cut who couldn’t keep the pimples off his face, no matter how many Stridex pads he burned through.” He was taunted as a boy as “Newscum,” the same schoolyard put-down that President Trump uses for him today.
Moreover, his severe dyslexia complicated his life as a student and, later, as a politician. “I couldn’t read; I couldn’t spell; I couldn’t write,” he writes. “I’d run out of the room screaming that I didn’t know what was wrong with my brain.” He responded by overcompensating: memorizing speeches and fabricating bibliographies to affix to school papers.
In the end, Newsom never gets around to directly addressing some of the events that have colored the public’s impression of him. How could a governor with such honed political instincts attend a mask-less dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants in his state, at the height of the Covid pandemic? How could he embrace Charlie Kirk on his podcast one day and assail Donald Trump the next?
Newsom has often seemed unknowable — distant and inscrutable. In passages that are at times unapologetically self-promoting, he shows that he craves attention yet is wary of it. He is cognizant of his failures and foibles, as well as his political talents: running for office and, now, positioning himself as one of his party’s leading foils to Trump.
I finished his memoir with a better understanding of why he often seems to be trying so hard, why he always seems to have one eye on the mirror — and why, over the years, he has engaged in the kind of self-destructive behavior that could be damaging for someone with presidential ambitions. In many ways, Newsom is still the kid with dyslexia who fabricated a bibliography so he could get a passing grade on a paper.
As presented in “Young Man in a Hurry,” Newsom is a man shaped more by hardship and struggle than privilege. Whether voters come to accept this portrayal may well determine whether there is another memoir in his future.
YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY: A Memoir of Discovery | By Gavin Newsom | Penguin Press | 291 pp. | $30
Adam Nagourney is the classical music and dance reporter for The Times.
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