Young Man in a Hurry

Gavin Newsom, the 40th governor of California, traces six generations of family history across two clans, the Newsoms and the Menzies-Addises, while recounting his path from a dyslexic child of divorce to entrepreneur and politician. Writing from Sacramento during a season of wildfire, pandemic, and political upheaval, he reflects on the forces that shaped him: an absent but intellectually powerful father, a fiercely hardworking mother, proximity to great wealth, and a neurological condition that scrambled words on the page but sharpened his memory and instincts.

Newsom's father, William Newsom III, was a San Francisco judge and devoted reader who left the family in the early 1970s and moved to Lake Tahoe. Despite the distance, he became an intellectual and spiritual force through summer trips exploring California's rivers and mountains. The Newsom family traced its roots six generations back to a great-great-grandfather who arrived from County Cork, Ireland. Gavin's grandfather, William "the Boss" Newsom, was a housing developer and political kingmaker who managed campaigns for Governor Edmund "Pat" Brown.

On his mother's side, the family history was more guarded and troubled. Newsom's maternal grandmother, Jean Addis Menzies, was an actress and nurse who traveled to Soviet Russia in the 1930s and lived by a code of strict silence: Nothing inside the house was to be spoken of outside. Her father, Dr. Thomas Addis, was a pioneering kidney researcher at Stanford University whose antifascist politics drew FBI surveillance during the McCarthy era. Newsom's maternal grandfather, Arthur Menzies, a horticulturalist, returned from nearly three years as a Japanese prisoner of war deeply affected by the experience. His alcoholism escalated until one night he lined his three young daughters up and pointed a gun at them before Jean calmly took the weapon away. Arthur eventually died by suicide. These revelations reach Newsom years later through his Aunt Cindy, his mother's older sister. Reflecting on the knowledge, he writes, "Knowledge too late for anything but knowledge. This is the incapacity I am left with" (197).

Newsom's mother, Tessa Menzies, grew up sharing a private language with her twin sister, Anne, and remained largely silent for their first six years. She married William Newsom at 19 in a civil ceremony witnessed only by Gordon Getty, heir to the Getty oil fortune and William's lifelong friend, and Gordon's wife, Ann. After the divorce, Tessa juggled three jobs to support Gavin and his sister, Hilary, leaning on her twin and brother-in-law Paul Scherer, a podiatrist who became a surrogate father to the children.

Newsom's dyslexia, a neurological condition that causes the brain to scramble letters and words, went undiagnosed throughout childhood. He compensated by studying a dictionary cover to cover, taking meticulous notes, and memorizing details. The family's connection to the Gettys, one of the wealthiest dynasties in the world, runs through the book as a parallel narrative. William Newsom served for decades as the family's unpaid informal adviser, a role that included coordinating logistics during the 1973 kidnapping of young Paul Getty in Italy. Summer vacations with the Gettys exposed Gavin and Hilary to private jets, African safaris, and a tour of fossilized hominid footprints with paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey, experiences the siblings learned to hide from their mother.

Adolescence brought transformation. By junior year at Redwood High School in Marin County, Newsom was a two-sport standout in baseball and basketball. He discovered nonfiction books with visual elements that accommodated his dyslexia, developing sharp memory skills through annotation. At Santa Clara University on a partial baseball scholarship, a nerve injury ended his playing career. A semester studying art history in Rome allowed him to excel through the visual nature of the material. He struggled with a statistics course, and only after an adviser learned of his dyslexia did he receive a waiver to graduate. His father counseled him against law school, suggesting instead the path of Boss Newsom: business and politics.

Newsom developed PlumpJack Wines, a store intended to democratize fine wine through competitive pricing and customer education, naming the business after the Falstaff figure from Gordon Getty's opera. After raising $174,000 from friends and family, he opened the store as its sole employee. Through relentless innovation and community building, PlumpJack grew into a portfolio of wineries, hotels, restaurants, and bars with 700 employees. His business partnership with Billy Getty, Gordon's son, later unraveled after a dispute, and the friendship never recovered, a loss Newsom calls one of the great holes in his life.

Newsom entered politics in 1996 when Mayor Willie Brown appointed him to San Francisco's Parking and Traffic Commission and later offered him a seat on the Board of Supervisors, where he became, at 29, the only straight white male on the 11-member board. As a supervisor, he sponsored Proposition N, known as "Care Not Cash," which redirected a portion of homeless individuals' welfare payments to housing and treatment; voters approved it with 60 percent in 2002. Elected mayor in 2003 at age 36, he launched Project Homeless Connect, a one-stop outreach model that became a national template, reducing street homelessness by 40 percent and moving more than 12,000 people into permanent housing. He also partnered with other mayors to meet Kyoto Protocol emissions targets and made San Francisco the first city to ban plastic shopping bags.

In February 2004, after hearing President George W. Bush call for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Newsom ordered the city to begin issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples despite near-unanimous opposition from his own staff. Over 28 days, 4,035 couples married before the California Supreme Court halted the practice. The backlash was severe: Senator Dianne Feinstein blamed him for John Kerry's presidential defeat, and the Democratic National Convention denied him a speaking slot. The U.S. Supreme Court did not affirm a constitutional right to same-sex marriage until years later.

Newsom's mother, Tessa, had died of breast cancer in 2002 at 55, and he channeled his grief into work rather than emotional reckoning. His marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle, a San Francisco prosecutor, ended in divorce after four years. A brief affair with a staffer married to his deputy chief of staff became public, and Newsom calls it the worst betrayal of his life. At the insistence of Mimi Silbert, founder of the Delancey Street rehabilitation center, he stopped drinking and underwent months of counseling that forced him to confront the patterns underlying his behavior: the undiagnosed dyslexia, the emotional distance inherited from both parents, and the self-sabotage that accompanied unchecked ambition.

He met Jennifer Siebel on a blind date in 2006. She was a Stanford-educated documentary filmmaker who carried her own buried grief after accidentally backing a golf cart over her eight-year-old sister, Stacia, who died from the injuries. They married in 2008 and had four children. After serving as lieutenant governor, Newsom championed two successful 2016 ballot measures: Proposition 63, requiring background checks for ammunition, and Proposition 64, legalizing recreational cannabis.

Newsom won the 2018 governor's race decisively. On election night, his dying father sat in a wheelchair nearby, sustained through esophageal cancer by sheer will, unable to speak but unmistakable in his pride. William died shortly after, looking out at the Golden Gate Bridge. The morning after the election, Newsom confronted the Paradise wildfire, which killed 85 people and destroyed 19,000 structures. He accompanied Governor Brown and President Trump on a tour of the fire zone, where Trump mispronounced "Paradise" as "Pleasure" and suggested raking forests as a solution. Newsom reflects that Trump possessed surface kindness alongside a deep capacity for feeling aggrieved.

In the epilogue, Jen became pregnant at 46. When the pregnancy failed at nine weeks, emergency surgery saved her life on New Year's Eve, highlighting the kind of reproductive health care later threatened by the Supreme Court's overturning of abortion rights. Two summers after his father's death, Newsom discovered a red leather diary at the family cabin in Dutch Flat, containing his father's handwritten entries dating back to the 1970s. He read only a few lines before closing it. His daughter Brooklynn occasionally pulls the diary down: "Popa-pop had bad handwriting, Dad." Newsom smiles: "But he had a wonderful grasp of comedy."