Gavin Newsom Opens The Oppo Book In His New Memoir

Gavin Newsom doesn’t tiptoe around political tripwires of his life in his new memoir — he barrels into them.

From the tabloid-fodder dalliances between his first and second marriage to an unvarnished account of his mother’s terminal cancer culminating in assisted suicide, Newsom takes an “open-the-oppo-book” tack in “Young Man in a Hurry,” which will be released later this month.

Newsom’s account, more than five years in the making, is both an exercise in radical honesty and strategic inoculation, given his all-but-certain presidential run in 2028. He comes across as a man keenly aware of what's been said about him, down to his hair gel, and now wants to say it for himself, on his own terms.

The fodder that is familiar to longtime Newsom-watchers — the high school summers spent on African safaris and helicopter tours with the high-society Getty family, the ill-advised Harper’s Bazaar photoshoot with his first wife-turned-MAGA devotee Kimberly Guilfoyle — has now been compiled into one package to be consumed by a national audience that is sizing him up as a possible commander-in-chief.

But while the book is clearly meant to neutralize the anticipated attacks that could stymie a presidential run, it is also a knottier work of self-excavation. The throughline of the memoir is not Newsom’s policy vision or ideological conviction; it is, as he writes, the “riddle” of his identity, the product of a “split personality” upbringing that Newsom, well into adulthood, still struggles to reconcile.

“This is me taking the mask off,” Newsom said in an interview. “And it's not just me taking a mask off and then sanitizing what's underneath. It's scrutinizing what's underneath. It's stress-testing it, and it's trying to crack it open further and further.”

Newsom spends more time unpacking his personal history than laying out a governing manifesto — closer to “Dreams From My Father” than “The Audacity of Hope,” on the Barack Obama spectrum of political memoirs. By leaning in to potential liabilities, he shows a similar instinct as his likely 2028 rival, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who made his Jewish faith a dominant theme in his newly-released book even as his steadfast support for Israel causes friction with a growing number of Democratic voters.

By ending the memoir (mostly) before he takes office as governor, he has no cause to mention most of the current crop of potential Democratic candidates. That allows Newsom to sidestep the intra-party food fight that tends to happen when politicians spill about their rivals, such as the Democratic squabbling after Kamala Harris’ latest book, “107 Days.” Harris, notably, makes only a brief cameo in Newsom’s book as a “longtime friend” despite rising in tandem up the ranks of San Francisco and California politics for much of their careers.

Newsom dedicates plenty of words to scuffing up the slick “Patrick Bateman meets Sparkle Beach Ken” (to borrow a jab from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent) image that has been Newsom’s inescapable calling card as he climbed the ranks of San Francisco’s business and political ladders.

Newsom paints his adolescent self as a “gimpy geek” with a bowl cut and pimples and portrays his infamous hair gel as armor, a crutch to get through his awkward teenage years that he’s never given up.

He writes about how his severe dyslexia, undiagnosed for years, made it nearly impossible for him to read or write as a child and still trips him up in prepared speeches. He was a lackluster student who was booted from elementary school, cheated on English papers using Cliff’s Notes and, after one frustrating night of homework, told by his mother, “It’s okay to be average, Gavin.” It was meant to be a consolation, but, he said, “I don’t recall crueler words ever said about me.”

The perennial knock on Newsom as a politician is that he is unknowable, a chameleon that can offer something to everyone but is hard to pin down. His memoir reveals that “who is Gavin Newsom?” is a question that Newsom himself can’t easily answer.

Newsom is the main character of the book, but its center of gravity is his parents: William Newsom III, who was embedded in the heart of San Francisco and California politics though his own ambitions for elected office fell short, and Tessa Menzies, who, after their short-lived marriage, juggled multiple jobs to provide a tenuous suburban upbringing for Gavin and his sister, Hilary.

He spends much of the book striving to explain his parents and his relationships with them, climbing up the family tree in search of clues as to his mother’s sharp-eyed guardedness or his father’s thwarted political ambitions. He infuses his lineage with provocative specifics: his father dropping acid for LSD research in the 1950s, his paternal great-grandmother with a horse-betting habit and Irish Republican Army loyalties, his maternal grandmother’s lefty politics that led to a three-year pilgrimage to the USSR.

At times, the family lore goes from colorful to dark. Newsom discovers his mother and two aunts suffered horrors in their childhood home, including an episode when their father, traumatized by World War II, lines the girls up by the fireplace and threatens to shoot them. When their mother returned home to find the scene, she calmly took the gun from her husband’s hand and never spoke about the incident again.

He is also unsparing in describing his mother’s death in her apartment by a fatal dose of morphine after a years-long battle with breast cancer, at a time when assisted suicide was not legal. He recounts witnessing a look on his mother’s face in her last moments “that will never leave my mind. There was no peace that blanketed her.”

The painfully personal disclosures extend to Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Some she has gingerly spoken about before: The childhood golf cart accident in which she ran over and killed her sister and her traumatic encounter as a young actress with producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. And he shares, for the first time, her surprise (and ultimately nonviable) fifth pregnancy at age 46.

Mining his family’s past isn’t what made Newsom a gossip column mainstay. He knows what his audience is looking for — Gettys, Guilfoyle, and girlfriends — and he serves them up with varying degrees of candor.

Newsom goes deepest on the Getty family, the epitome of 20th century American elite that has been a dominant force in his life. Newsom’s father was a lifetime confidante and trust manager to Gordon Getty, the son of the oil baron patriarch J. Paul Getty. In turn, Gordon Getty and his wife Ann treated Gavin and his sister to lavish vacations, expensive clothes and a glimpse into how the upper echelon lived.

For someone who visibly resents the perception he was born with a silver spoon, Newsom is not stingy in detailing the grandeur afforded by a Getty-adjacent life. He writes about custom-tailored designer suits and parties at Venetian palazzos with Jack Nicholson. But he also recounts the downsides of those associations, like his mother’s betrayed reaction after his return from overseas jaunts and later, the nagging knock that his success in business, including investments in his wine store-turned-hospitality business, was only thanks to his generous benefactors.

“I never considered that … my deeper entry into the Getty world would rob me of my own hard-earned story, a theft that would become one of the very reasons for writing this book,” Newsom writes.

Guilfoyle, his first wife, enters the book on an ominous note, with Newsom’s friend Billy Getty warning him to “be careful.” But Newsom refrains from swiping at his ex-wife, who later was engaged to Donald Trump Jr., in his own words; instead, he lets his mother and sister’s wary appraisals of Guilfoyle as over-the-top and needing to command a room do the talking.

He does an obligatory confessional about his bachelor life after Guilfoyle. His tryst with staffer Ruby Rippey-Tourk, who was married at the time to his friend and campaign manager Alex Tourk, appears as “the stupidest and also briefest of affairs,” which then became a public scandal. A short-lived relationship with Sofia Milos, an actress associated with the Church of Scientology, gets a perfunctory one-paragraph mention. (Other dates, such as a 20-year-old model nearly two decades his junior, caused a minor stir in San Francisco but don’t get a mention.)

Personal dramas and self-examination tend to overshadow politics, Newsom’s actual vocation, throughout the memoir. In Newsom’s telling, elected office is not portrayed as a calling, but as another source of personal ambivalence. It opens a new dimension in his relationship with his father, even as his mother starkly pleads with him to get out of politics.

Newsom dutifully zooms through his tenure as San Francisco supervisor and mayor, recounting his breakout moment in national politics issuing same-sex marriage licenses in 2004 and the Sisyphean effort to stem the city’s homeless population. His decision to end the memoir before becoming governor means the most recent vulnerabilities in his record, such as the French Laundry scandal, which fueled the 2021 recall effort against him, go unmentioned.

His self-assessment as a politician can dip into cliché; at one point, he describes his campaign style as “presuming I was 20 points behind.” And despite brief soliloquies on issues like gun control and climate change, he does little to lay out a cohesive political philosophy or even give much indication where he situates himself on the spectrum of Democratic politics.

“This is not that book. I could write that book in six months,” Newsom told POLITICO. “ChatGPT could write that book … ‘From Resistance to Renewal: Gavin Newsom’s Ten Policy Priorities’ — that’s a predictable book after the midterms. Half of us come out with one of those if [we’re] running for office.”

He does, however, sprinkle the book with references to fly-fishing and hunting, and a pronouncement by The Economist that, as mayor, he was not “the loony liberal of conservative tirades,” lest anyone assume he is the archetype of an out-there California lefty.

His prose is much livelier when describing the California icons that bluntly taught him politics as it’s really practiced — former Mayor Willie Brown and Democratic Party boss John Burton — and the San Francisco media personalities that covered him with a gimlet eye.

Notably, the book’s aperture does not open up much beyond Northern California. National political figures get passing mentions, if any. The glaring exception, at the end of the book, is President Donald Trump, who makes an extended appearance in a late 2018 visit to the sites of two devastating California wildfires. There, Newsom, who had been elected governor days earlier, gets to witness in person Trump’s gravitational pull, even, in his telling, leaving Gov. Jerry Brown uncharacteristically star struck and calling his wife for an impromptu phone call with the president.

“I considered myself a student of the gruff Jerry Brown, the iconoclastic Jerry Brown, the detached Jerry Brown,” Newsom wrote. “But this Jerry Brown seemed thoroughly taken by the moment.”

Two years earlier, upon Trump’s first White House win, Newsom had pondered how to approach the incoming president and decided that “attacking Trump the personality, while it might do wonders for the gut, was a losing game.” Since then, Newsom has shot to the top of the list of 2028 Democratic hopefuls by doing exactly the opposite.

Add that to the long list of contradictions that have defined Newsom’s private and public life — and Newsom himself, a riddle he acknowledged in an interview he has yet to solve.

“I’m just putting it out there. Let other good people judge,” he said. “But hey, at least it’s on my terms, not yours.”