I like that Aaron Burr! / I can’t believe we’re here with him! He seems approachable? / Like you could grab a beer with him.” So goes “The Election of 1800,” a song from the musical Hamilton in which Democratic-Republican presidential candidate Aaron Burr, who’s “not very forthcoming on any particular stances,” faces off against Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. I was reminded of this song as I read California governor Gavin Newsom’s Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, which many have speculated is the opening salvo in his Democratic bid for president in 2028.
But this is not really a standard-issue political autobiography. It has no policy prescriptions and mostly only broad signs of how Newsom would govern, were he to become president. Instead, it’s a very personal account of his struggles and victories. Perhaps due to the influence of the book’s ghostwriter, journalist Mark Arax, known for his California-centric books The Dreamt Land and The King of California, it’s literature that narrates a piece of California’s cultural history as seen through a Gen X lens. While strong, however, this is also a memoir that feels crafted to pass the beer test, a political thought experiment in which voters are asked which candidate they’d most like to grab a beer with in order to measure likability.
Ordinary details and telling anecdotes combine to form a clearer picture than we’ve had of Newsom’s personal history and inner life—his love of the logic and lines of baseball, though he initially struggles to hit a ball; his falling in love with art history because it is visual; his enthusiastic discovery of janitor turned self-help evangelist Tony Robbins, with whose help he realizes, “Your past does not equal your future.” Newsom recounts the advice offered by his politically connected father’s friends, who include Gordon Getty, the philanthropist and businessman; Joe Cotchett, the notable and influential plaintiff’s attorney; Jerry Brown, the 34th and 39th governor of California; and the late state senator John Burton.
The most vivid parts of Young Man in a Hurry are also the most moving and engaging: the memoir’s earnest depiction of Newsom’s family and family history. His parents, in particular, were from two different worlds. When he was small, his father, William Alfred Newsom III, a judge with literary inclinations, left his family behind in San Francisco and moved to the Lake Tahoe area. He abandoned his much younger wife, Tessa Menzies Newsom (she was 19 to his 32 when they married, and she came from no money and a dysfunctional family), and their two small children, Gavin and Hilary. Although Newsom’s father would later say, in a letter that his former wife would never see, that he still loved her, he didn’t provide sufficient financial support, and even on his deathbed, he didn’t speak freely of his love for Newsom.
In this memoir, we see the future governor and his sister grow up poor in homes in San Francisco and Marin County; their mother “[juggles] three jobs to keep a roof” over their heads and takes in foster kids. This thread of Newsom’s story remains sad to the end: His mother struggles with breast cancer, choosing to die because of the pain, and in this situation and others, like in his first marriage, to Kimberly Guilfoyle, Newsom buries himself in work rather than deal with personal difficulties head-on.
At 13, Newsom works a paper route, through which he derives a sense of pride in his work ethic, a quality also cultivated through a series of other jobs detailed here. But he equally acknowledges his access to privilege. He describes photographing polar bears at a “rugged Canadian outpost” and hot-air balloons over the Serengeti and a coming-out party for a Spanish princess. Yet when, at age 24, Newsom asks Getty to invest in his PlumpJack wineries, Getty says, “I’m not your huckleberry.… You should know that I’m not subsidizing this thing. But I’d be willing to do whatever the next guy is doing,” ultimately investing only $15,000; Getty is one of seven or eight investors.
Still, one can’t help but feel for the child that Newsom was. An elite world opens up to him early on, and he doesn’t refuse or deny it. He observes it; he tells stories about it; he also, it seems, loves it. Not only for the obvious material reasons but also, it seems, because he associates these experiences with his beloved if distant father, who was Getty’s best friend and also managed the Getty family trusts. Newsom clarifies the nature of the relationship: “I was always aware of the line that separated us from the Gettys. Not because they went out of their way to make us aware of it but because we, as good Newsoms, paid constant mind to the distinction.”
But meanwhile, his forays with the Gettys have a big enough impact to generate a rift between himself and his hardworking mother. And later on, Tessa Newsom is not pleased at her son’s success in San Francisco politics, preferring the joy he takes in running his wine business. He writes, “She watched the society crowd, whose wealth went back to the Gold Rush or some other California extraction, turn its gaze my way at fundraisers.… My mother did not want that world for me: The shrewd marriages of tall husbands and tall wives…the gritted teeth behind the social smiles.”
When he runs for mayor, after Tessa has been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998, she tells him, “Get out of politics. Get out before it’s too late.” According to him, she believed that, through his choices to go into business and then politics, he was trying to “solve the riddle” of his identity, “the question put there by my learning disability and the vastly different worlds that she and my father had presented to me.”
While Newsom carefully recounts his struggles, including the emotionally painful and severe case of dyslexia he references, they seem to have instilled in him a bootstrapper’s mentality. This may explain why some of his governing choices do not sit well with his critics on the left.
Newsom’s recent decisions to make common cause with the right, rather than try to reconcile with the left in certain areas, leave one wishing there were deeper insights in this narrative. He once was a politician who was the first to trumpet support for same-sex marriage—who walked out of the 2004 State of the Union, where then-president George W. Bush claimed he might seek a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, muttering, “These are my people Bush is attacking. My constituents. My staff. My closest advisors.”
By directing the city clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Newsom showed a burst of moral courage, acting even though he understood that he might be committing political suicide. So what was the mental route by which he later turned into a person who, for example, invited Charlie Kirk onto his podcast and fails to heed pleas among his constituents to support the trans community and its needs? The book’s answer seems to be simply that he goes with his gut, but this feels inadequate.
Perhaps complex public examination is more the province of a biographer or historian than a journalist or a politician turned memoirist—parsing these apparent contradictions may well be Newsom’s life’s work. It seems unlikely that readers will change their minds about him at a political level, even as there is much to appreciate—and like—in his personal story. We will need to wait for answers to the harder questions.•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
