Young Man in a Hurry
By Gavin Newsom
Penguin Press, 304 pages, $30
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom’s memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, is not simply the story of a politician rising through the ranks of San Francisco society and California politics. And now, as he positions himself for what most observers expect will be a future run for president of the United States, his memoir reads like an origin story for a national campaign. It is a study in how a public figure constructs himself through the models available to him. The book reveals a man who learned early that identity could be assembled from borrowed parts — gestures, styles, affiliations, and even family histories — so long as they pointed toward the life he hoped to inhabit. What emerges is a portrait of a man shaped by the gravitational pull of the people he admired — and wanted to become.
The memoir reveals a man who has repeatedly assembled himself from the people he admires, adopting their styles, their stories, and their social worlds as raw material for his own identity.
Newsom begins by recounting his teenage fascination with Pierce Brosnan’s character in the TV drama of the 1980s, Remington Steele. He copied the actor’s elegance, confidence, and slicked‑back hair, as if a persona could be slipped on like a tailored suit. This early imitation set the pattern for a life in which he repeatedly sought out figures whose confidence and glamour seemed to offer a template for who he might become.
The most powerful of these models was San Francisco’s most elite family, the Getty family sons. Because Newsom’s father served as a legal advisor and friend to the wealthy Getty family, young Gavin spent weekends and vacations in their world — a world of private jets, yachts, luxury hotels, and royal palaces. He recalls with pride that strangers on their travels often assumed he was one of the Getty boys, and he admits he did not correct them. Passing as a Getty was not a misunderstanding; it was a preview of the identity he hoped to claim. (RELATED: Gavin Newsom Claims Working-Class Background, Teases Presidential Run)
The memoir devotes several pages to these scenes with a mixture of nostalgia and awe. Newsom describes the “education” he received through the Gettys: summers that lifted him out of one reality and dropped him into another, wardrobes assembled at Wilkes Bashford at Ann Getty’s instruction, and the dizzying experience of being outfitted in Brioni, Valentino, and Versace for a trip to Spain. He writes of looking in the mirror and seeing someone who could walk onto the set of Miami Vice. The clothes were expensive, but the real currency was that they provided a ticket to belonging to the world the Gettys inhabited.
This early apprenticeship in elite performance shaped his young adulthood. With Getty backing and a partnership with Billy Getty, Newsom opened a wine shop and café in San Francisco — an enterprise that signaled sophistication and entrepreneurial promise. But even this venture revealed the fragility of the image he was constructing. During a heat wave, the neglected HVAC system failed, and bottles began to leak, bleeding wine down their labels. A quarter of the inventory was lost. The episode reads like a parable: the polished surface was impressive, but the infrastructure beneath it was unstable.
Newsom’s first marriage fits the same pattern. His union with Kimberly Guilfoyle, a former Victoria’s Secret model and rising star in San Francisco’s social scene, made perfect sense within the script he had been following since adolescence. She embodied the glamour and cultural capital he had long craved. The fact that she had previously dated his business partner, Billy Getty, only heightened the appeal. Her desirability had already been validated by the very world Newsom wanted to mirror.
His sister Hilary, however, saw the dynamic more clearly. She warned that Guilfoyle’s need for attention was bottomless and that the relationship felt unbalanced. But Newsom was not drawn to balance; he was drawn to the prestige that proximity to her offered. When the marriage eventually collapsed, it exposed the instability of an identity built on borrowed desire.
As Newsom moved into political life, he began to reshape his origin story. Aware that his Getty ties might cast him as a dilettante, he turned instead to the left‑wing politics of his mother’s family. In the memoir, he devotes pages to his grandparents’ and great‑grandparents’ involvement with the Communist Party, recounting FBI visits, suspected wiretaps, and his grandmother’s activism and advocacy for the Rosenbergs during their trial for espionage. Newsom recalls that his grandmother devoted herself to retrieving and copying documents that she believed would help to free the Rosenbergs. These stories allowed him to borrow the moral drama of radical Communist dissent, even as he continued to benefit from the wealth and connections of the Getty world.
This dual identity — elite insider and heir to leftist rebellion — gave Newsom a flexible persona that could appeal to both business leaders and progressive activists. It also revealed a deeper pattern: when one model no longer served his ambitions, he reached for another.
The memoir hints at a rupture with the Gettys, likely tied to an audit of the wine café. Local media reports described it as a “bitter falling out” between Newsom and Billy Getty. Whatever the cause, the break was politically convenient. As Newsom sought office in a city suspicious of inherited wealth, distancing himself from the Gettys allowed him to craft a more populist image. The benefactors who had shaped him became liabilities, and he adjusted accordingly. The disciple, having absorbed what he needed, stepped away from the model.
This pattern resurfaced during his tenure as mayor, when he engaged in an affair with Ruby Rippey‑Tourk, the wife of his deputy chief of staff and close friend, Alex Tourk. The scandal was painful for all involved, but within the logic of Newsom’s life story, it followed a familiar structure. He had long gravitated toward people whose confidence and social ease he admired. Tourk was part of that inner circle. The attraction to Ruby was not simply personal; it was entangled with the prestige embodied by her husband. Desire, in Newsom’s world, often moved through the people he envied.
When the affair became public, Newsom delivered a televised apology that echoed President Bill Clinton’s 1998 confession during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The lowered voice, the solemn pauses, the measured cadence — all of it felt studied. Clinton had demonstrated how a politician might survive humiliation, and Newsom followed the script. Even in contrition, he reached for a model.
Young Man in a Hurry is not framed as a meditation on imitation, but it becomes one. Newsom’s life, as he tells it, is a sequence of borrowed gestures: the elegance of Pierce Brosnan, the glamour of the Gettys, the rebellious romance of his mother’s Communist relatives, the charisma of his political allies, the survival strategies of Clinton. The memoir reveals a man who has repeatedly assembled himself from the people he admires, adopting their styles, their stories, and their social worlds as raw material for his own identity.
This does not make the book dishonest. In fact, its sincerity is what makes it revealing. Newsom writes openly about the people who shaped him and the personas he tried on. He does not seem to recognize how much of his identity has been constructed through imitation, but the reader cannot miss it. The memoir becomes a case study in how ambition often moves through the gravitational pull of those whose lives seem to promise the self that one hopes to become.
In the end, Young Man in a Hurry offers a portrait of a man who has spent decades assembling a self from borrowed parts. Whether that self can withstand the pressures of national presidential politics remains to be seen. But the memoir makes one thing clear: Gavin Newsom has always been most himself when he is becoming someone else.
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