Seven moments that stand out from Gavin Newsom’s new memoir

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Seven moments that stand out from Gavin Newsom’s new memoir

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new book Young Man in a Hurry is out on Tuesday.

In the memoir — one of the most anticipated in the political cycle — Newsom, a frontrunner in the 2028 presidential race, seeks to introduce himself to voters and define himself before his opponents do.

Here are seven things that stand out:

Struggles with Dyslexia

Newsom opens the book by describing one of his biggest obstacles.

“One of the struggles of my life is that my brain has trouble processing words on a page,” Newsom writes on the first page of chapter one.

He says that the curious might wonder how that “complicates my job” and acknowledges that he has had to “overcome a lot of obstacles on the path to becoming a more confident public speaker.”

“But I have yet to manage the spatial tracking of looking down and up. It feels like vertigo. Reading from a teleprompter is easier only because the lines appear with plenty of space. “

Stories about his mom

One of Newsom’s biggest vulnerabilities may be the perception that he’s a slick guy who dines at French Laundry and is out of touch with the everyday voter.

In the book, Newsom goes out of his way to describe how he grew up with a mom who juggled multiple jobs — working as an assistant buyer in a children’s department, a bookkeeper and as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant on weekends, all while dabbling in real estate on the side.

His mom also had to ask her twin sister to help with childcare for him and his sister. Still, even with “a host of surrogates,” oftentimes, they were home alone, he acknowledges.

“We raised ourselves on giant bowls of Mac and cheese and thought nothing of it,” he writes. “When I first heard the term ‘latchkey kids’ years later, I thought to myself, Yeah that was my sister and me.’”

Newsom’s father, William, was the original “Young Man in a Hurry,” according to the book.

He describes his father as a frustrated, would-be politician who never quite made it to higher office. William Newsom ran for office twice, once for San Francisco county supervisor and then for state senate.

Years later, his father confessed that his brush with running for office were fool’s errands.

“In his estimation, he has let his ego get the best of him,” Newsom writes in the memoir. “The back-to-back campaigns,” he explained, left his father “in such deep financial debt that he could no longer face our mother” which led to Newsom’s parents’ divorce and his father moving away.

Interactions with Trump

Newsom devotes quite a few pages to President Trump, including their phone calls and in-person interactions.

At one point, he recalls receiving a phone call from a “wounded” Trump after the president caught wind of a line in his inaugural address where the governor said, “We will offer an alternative to the corruption and incompetence in the White House.”

“I thought that was a little tough,” Trump told Newsom. “I thought you and I had something.”

Newsom recalls acknowledging that it was a “a tough line.”

“I get it,” Newsom recalled Trump saying. “It’s politics.”

The two men got off the phone, agreeing that they were “good.” (This comes after Trump tells Newsom his wife is ‘pretty hot.’”)

In the book, the governor writes that he had little in common with Trump:

“He was East Coast. I was West Coast. He grew up with wealth. I grew up around wealth, though it was a different sort from Trump’s grift,” he writes.

“What we did share — my past, his present — was a link to Kimberly,” Newsom writes, referring to his ex-wife Kimberly Guilifoyle, and then-girlfriend to Trump’s eldest son Donald Trump Jr.

“I did not realize it back then, but my fate as governor, and the well-being of our state, would rest on my ability to make Trump, ever more mercurial, care about me and California, even as he was sowing the seeds that would threaten to upend my governorship in a way I would not see coming.

Speaking of Guilfoyle

Newsom spends several pages discussing his four-year marriage to Guilfoyle, and the infamous eight-page Harper’s Bazaar spread where he said the crew “directed me to lie down next to Kimberly” on an oriental carpet.

The much-mocked feature irritated his sister, Newsom said.

“In your workspace you don’t let anyone push you around. But in your private sphere, you have a pattern of letting the women in your life dictate your movements — actions that come back to bite you…Had I been there, I would have told you, ‘Get your ass off the floor. You’re the mayor of San Francisco. That’s not a good look.’”

The governor writes about the brief relationship he had with a staff member while he was mayor and uses it to explain how he decided in 2007 to stop drinking.

He recounts a family friend who ran a rehab center telling him “You’re not some single guy. You’re the goddamn mayor. You’re thirty-nine years old. And what the f**k are you doing getting involved with a staff member?”

Newsom confesses to having sessions akin to therapy with the friend where he sought to lay himself bare on a number of issues including his dyslexia and his parents’ divorce.

Getting personal on Dobbs decision

In another personal account in the book’s epilogue, Newsom writes about his wife, Jen, becoming pregnant at 46 and then learning at nine weeks that the fetus no longer had a heartbeat.

She needed an emergency procedure to remove it. He says he thought about what would happen if he would have lost her, and what \life would be like for his children.

“The surgery that Jen never wanted in her life became a matter of medical necessity,” he writes. “Jen received the healthcare that would very soon be denied to countless women in red state America” because of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.

“In one of the most medically advanced countries in the world, we had gone backward a half century in time,” he said.

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