Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, by Gavin Newsom. Penguin Press, 304 pages.

Let’s start with the acknowledgments, usually the best place to begin in a political memoir. Here the author admits that he is less composer and more collaborator. Although his name appears on the cover and the story is his own, the real work of compilation is done by a shadow army of ghostwriters, developmental editors, line editors, copy editors, and fact checkers. No one feels any compunction about this arrangement. It is just the way the business works. The writers and editors offer their services, the author accepts, and everyone who participated in the project gets half a line of thanks. Most people know you can’t judge a book by its cover. Only those in publishing understand that you must consult the acknowledgements.

Gavin Newsom is cognizant of this industry dynamic, and it suits him well. The governor of California is one of the most forthright fakers in American politics. He proudly declares in the acknowledgements of Young Man in a Hurry that he did not write his memoir. Instead, he “enjoyed the privilege” of hiring Mark Arax, a literary nonfiction journalist in California, to do the work for him. The idea was to produce something classier than a campaign book. Arax’s role “went beyond mere ghostwriter,” Newsom says. “He asked for one thing: that the memoir would go where it needed to go, no matter how personal and wrenching, and I agreed.”

That’s a big promise, especially coming from a guy who is eyeing the White House in 2028. Pity that Newsom doesn’t deliver. Young Man in a Hurry fails on its own terms. It is neither personal nor wrenching. Worse, neither author nor writer seems to understand how badly he has blundered. Nor, I should add, do most reviewers. The memoir has been praised for its literary qualities, for its humility, for its honesty. It possesses none of these things. It is a pastiche of introspection; unconvincing and shallow, like Newsom himself. 

The problem of authenticity is one with which Newsom has struggled ever since he got into politics. His family is one of the most venerable in San Francisco, and he spent much of his childhood gadding about the world with the Getty children, whose family trust his father administered. His first political assignment was an appointed position, courtesy of Willie Brown, another friend of his father’s. Almost every position has occupied since has owed something to his family name and connections. Newsom does not deny nor downplay any of it. But he insists that he has known struggle too. His parents divorced when he was young, and his mother had to work three jobs just to get by. He claims that as a child he was gangly, awkward, and afflicted by undiagnosed dyslexia. When he grew up, he became aware of a painful duality within himself that he has spent years attempting to understand. 

“Before my image had been curated and projected onto the screen by the packaging of politics, I was some combination of genes and upbringings whose imprint I struggled to deduce,” Newsom says. “I began to tunnel backward, the questions more lucid in my head. I might have stopped at the first painful revelation, but my obsessive gear kicked in and I kept boring deeper into the past.”

Boring is the right word. Arax clearly tried to extract some admission from the governor, some telling anecdote that reveals the humanity behind his self-serious bluster. After all, the book is subtitled “A Memoir of Discovery.” But the ghostwriter came up short. So he was forced instead to insert vague circumlocutions where there should have been specific details. Thus, we learn that Newsom was ejected from third grade “for one shortcoming or another” and that his grandmother gave him a drawing lesson in “one thing and another.” He tells us that the past was “all too painful” for his father to recount, and when he did tell stories about it, he used a script that was “all too familiar” to his son. Yet Newsom still finds the voice of his father within him “all too alive.” And when Arax does manage to get a real story out of the governor, it is usually only insipid family lore. “Nobody could ever get me to eat peas. I would never eat peas,” Newsom recalls his father saying. But one day his grandmother “mashed them in the mashed potatoes, and I ate peas.” 

This is not to say that the book is completely content-free. In some places it’s packed with facts, too many facts. Arax has a tendency, typical of political journalists, to mistake an overload of useless information for a stylistic flourish. Sometimes this manifests as fake descriptive writing. (On Gordon and Ann Getty: “They moved into a 1914 mansion set atop Pacific Heights with a one-of-a-kind view of the San Francisco Bay.”) Other times it surfaces as real descriptive writing that nevertheless does not tell the reader anything important. (On Treasure Island: “It had action, it had a place remote and mysterious, it had a one-legged pirate disguised as a cook named Long John Silver.”) At its most ludicrous, it employs the inane precision that I associate most readily with the novelist Dan Brown. (On touring Rome: “the rococo style of the 135 Spanish Steps,” On The Economist: “the London-based weekly that had been pushing its ‘radical centrism’ since the 1840s,” On Hilaire Belloc: “one of the Big Four of Edwardian letters.”) In the funniest of these howlers, Newsom declares that the movie Rocky “was the Metamorphoses for a kid like me”—perhaps the only time Sylvester Stallone has entered Ovid’s orbit.

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So much for the book’s literary qualities. Young Man in a Hurry’s political content is equally flimsy. Newsom seems to have poured so much effort into portraying himself as a sensitive young man that he forgot that his memoir is also a campaign book. Maybe there just isn’t much to say. The governor treats his political career in San Francisco at some length, but he tends to focus on piddling achievements. While a city commissioner, for example, he changed the name of the people who hand out parking tickets from “meter maid” to “parking control officer,” a bureaucratization which he treats as a massive win for human dignity. Similarly, while mayor, he changed the paperwork in the issuance of marriage licenses such that the forms no longer read “man and wife” but “Applicant One” and “Applicant Two,” a decision that (for a time) made San Francisco one of the few places to marry gay people. 

Once Newsom exits his hometown for state politics, he falls curiously silent. Little is said about his time as lieutenant governor. (He claims he was known simply as the “guns and weed dude.”) And almost nothing about his current office. The narrative strategically ends while Newsom is governor-elect, allowing him to skirt any discussion of his conduct during the pandemic, his management of the state’s budget, and a host of other difficulties he has muddled through since taking control of California in 2019.

But the book is not a total wash. There is actually one revealing anecdote, though I doubt Newsom and Arax intended it to land as it does. Around the time Newsom was courting his second wife, Jen Siebel, he was also evading a stalker in San Francisco. Han Sup Shin was a middle-aged psychotic who dressed in purple ties and latex gloves and who enjoyed taking pictures of the mayor’s pants. One night, Shin attempted to break into Newsom’s apartment building with a roll of duct tape in his hand. He was arrested, and the police confiscated his bizarre photo collection, as well as a video recorder on which he was taping a cassette titled “President Newsom.”Newsom reflects that he found the incident disconcerting. He’s right to. Only a madman would seriously consider him in the White House.