Politicians seeking higher office publish memoirs to portray their lives in the best possible light. And now, California Gov. Gavin Newsom — in anticipation of the 2028 presidential election — will do the same.
Set for release in May, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery promises an “intimate” look at Gavin Newsom’s life. The book’s description, which attempts to cast Newsom as a profound thinker, says: “From California Governor Gavin Newsom comes an intimate and poignant account of identity, belonging, and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics.”
Newsom’s ghostwriter really has a lot of work cut out for him or her. It’s going to be tough — really, really tough — to spin Newsom’s life into a story that makes him appealing to the general public.
There is the fact that he was groomed to be a politician from birth by an oil billionaire. The slight issue that he was handed his first three political positions thanks to his upper-class birth and familial connections. And, oh yeah, the problem that Newsom has demonstrated — time and time again — that he views being a politician as a celebrity career rather than a public service role. (For just one piece of evidence of this, note that, as lieutenant governor, Newsom hosted his own TV show while at the same time publicly stating that he was in Sacramento “like one day a week, tops.”)
And how is the ghostwriter going to get around the really embarrassing personal scandals?
The relationship with the 19-year-old, with whom he had a 19-year age gap? The affair with the married woman? The drunken episode when he was supposed to be comforting the family of a fallen officer?
Will these scandals simply be ignored, or will some effort be made to address them?
There is also the long list of personal circumstances that will make it difficult, if not impossible, to spin Newsom as a man who will play well in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. (The Scientologist actress girlfriend. The New Age wedding officiated by a hypnotherapist. His wife’s strange past as an actress in a raunchy film.)
How do you take someone like this and make him seem approachable, let alone remotely normal?
The book’s description does give us some answers. Evidently, Newsom wants to claim that he faced considerable adversity and yet overcame it with a bravery and intensity that brought him to the pinnacles of success and accomplishment.
The difficulties listed in the description include his parents’ divorce (fair), his dyslexia (fair), and the “dissonance” between his mother’s middle-class status and his father’s wealth and elite status. Ah yes, having a rich and powerful dad who can hand you a business empire and political career is just so hard.
The description says:
[H]is childhood was spent being tugged between two worlds: his mother worked three jobs in order to care for her children while his father, a close friend of the Getty family, brought Newsom into San Francisco society, a world of wealth and connections. The dissonance was frustrating, and made all the more difficult because of undiagnosed dyslexia.
It makes sense that Newsom is going the route of claiming he has overcome adversity because he has long done this — even as his advisers have urged him to stop given how disingenuous it seems. (Practically growing up in the Getty mansion doesn’t sound to most people like their idea of a hard time.) At one point when Newsom was running for governor, he wanted to run ads about his supposedly difficult time growing up, but the ads tested so poorly that he was forced to give up the idea and shift to the strategy of focusing on his “courage.”
The book’s other theme makes sense. It is that Newsom has been ahead of the curve when it comes to a host of social issues. The description reads: “In Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom traces the forces that have defined his ambitions as a politician and have pushed him to outpace the nation on myriad cutting-edge social issues that have since entered the mainstream.” Indeed, many of the social changes in the United States this century — the legalization of gay marriage, the pushing of transgenderism onto children, the proliferation of legalized pot — have been driven by Newsom.
But, given the extent of the baggage that Newsom is trying to hide, there is little chance that this book will provide the “candor” and “remarkable personal insight” the description promises. I would submit that my biography of Gavin Newsom, Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power, provides a truer portrait of the aspects of Newsom’s life that really should be known.
Still, I will be highly entertained to read Newsom’s memoir if for no other reason than that it will be fascinating to see how he explains away the embarrassing scandals of his life.
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Ellie Gardey Holmes is the author of Newsom Unleashed: The Progressive Lust for Unbridled Power.
