Gavin Newsom’s memoir, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery,” was released this week, in which California’s governor sought to provide an honest and intimate account of his life and his motivations.
While the book is long on entertaining anecdotes about his life growing up in and around San Franciscan high society, Newsom’s attempts at self-awareness fail to change the perception that he is an elitist and a cold, calculating politician.
It’s well known that Newsom’s dad and grandfather were both well-connected members of the San Francisco elite, running with power brokers like Pat Brown, the Pelosis, Willie Brown, John Burton and the Gettys.
When his parents split, Newsom was lost between the gilded world of his father and the hard-working, private world of his mother.
I found Newsom’s descriptions of feeling adrift at this point in his life to be the most relatable.
My parents divorced when I was young and remarried when I was around 10 years old. I had two new families to get used to while simultaneously mourning the loss of my own. My mom remarried a middle class guy she met at work and my father married into a family like Newsom’s.
My stepmother’s father, Bill Maillard, was a Congressman from San Francisco and Marin, the last Republican from that area, in fact. He served in the Ford Administration and left a congressional seat that was filled by Burton. Newsom’s book names basically everyone from San Francisco except Bill, but anyway.
Get-togethers with my stepfather’s family were uncomfortable, especially since it was a large family with its own history, customs and jokes. But it was not nearly as hard as with the Maillards, who also had their own history, culture and jokes, but also had an entirely different world.
Country clubs and elaborate table settings and manners and other random things I knew nothing about. I love my step parents and their families were very kind to me, but it took a long time for me to feel as though I belonged anywhere.
I appreciated Newsom’s vulnerability in that sense. But where I didn’t relate was that I was a visitor in the Mailliard world, while Newsom was firmly anchored through his family to the elites. He had access to money and power that most people do not. He undoubtedly had insecurities, but he was never too far from opportunity.
I think he’d be more likeable if he stopped pretending to be average folk – like a few days ago when he told an Atlanta audience he was just like them because he scored low on his SATs and was dyslexic – and simply embraced his privilege. He’d certainly seem more authentic.
This tendency to try way too hard is as much a prevailing theme of the book as anything. Newsom wants to be all things to all people – but he’s not.
So much of the book is not really even about Newsom. I’m sure part of that was a strategy to sell books, but it told me nothing about Newsom that former San Francisco Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein was married to Sharon Stone, or that Newsom’s former girlfriend married Don Johnson, who himself had been married to Melanie Griffith (twice). While interesting, it told me nothing about Newsom to learn how tied to communism his grandmother was.
Though he appears to have tried to be self aware, Newsom’s ability to see himself failed him countless times. In one anecdote, he writes about having to take care of his one-year-old daughter while his wife was out of town, learning she had “outgrown the soporific of swaddling.”
Babies outgrow swaddling after a few months – how did he not notice before then?
Newsom often undercut serious topics with weird offhand comments. Newsom spends the majority of his book writing about his relationship with his father with great reverence and curiosity. This was a highlight of the book, but out of nowhere he writes: “There was a theory about a priest molesting him when he was young, but I rather doubted it…” Then he moved on.
The worst was when discussing his wife’s miscarriage. It was a very sad story, one of the most humanizing moments in the book. He wrote that though they heard a heartbeat in the first two ultrasounds, at nine weeks “the heartbeat was gone.”
“Had the fetus died? Had the fetus never really been alive? All those abstractions over the question ‘When does life begin?’ were beside the point,” Newsom wrote.
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The book’s timeline stops just short of Newsom becoming governor, which seems very convenient. Since this column is about the book and not his governorship, I’ll skip my thoughts on his time as governor. But if he was writing a book about his gubernatorial accomplishments, it would be more like a tweet than a novel.
“Young Man in a Hurry” is certainly one of the more entertaining political autobiographies I’ve read. But if you’re looking for a Newsom you didn’t already know, you’re unlikely to find it there.
Matt Fleming is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. Follow him on X @FlemingWords
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