What are the political goals of California Gov. Gavin Newsom's new memoir?

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In 2004, Gavin Newsom, at the time the mayor of San Francisco, posed with his then-wife Kimberly Guilfoyle for a magazine photograph that quickly became infamous.

In the photo, the couple lay entwined on a fancy carpet, wearing dinner attire, in a posh San Francisco home owned by the oil rich Getty family with a sweeping view of the Pacific Ocean visible behind them.

When the magazine published the story, members of Newsom’s own staff were taken by surprise by the photograph, according to a 2024 look back on the incident by New York Magazine. One Newsom aid who spoke to that magazine recalled immediately recognizing it was an embarrassing photo that would be around “for a long time.”

More than two decades later, Newsom is still trying to shake off the image of anointed California elitist that the photograph so roundly captures. He’s reportedly continuing to texturize that image through a forthcoming memoir that this week received coverage in select national media outlets.

In the book, “Young Man in a Hurry,” Newsom reportedly describes an ascension to adulthood that was more fraught than the photograph — and a long and well-documented association with the Gettys in business and in politics — would imply. This week brought stories in Vogue, The New York Times, Politico and The New Yorker, written by reporters who had received advanced copies of the book.

The Sacramento Bee asked a Newsom spokesperson for a copy but was not provided one.

Newsom doesn’t have much in common with voters in states like Ohio or Pennsylvania, Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at University of California Berkeley and University of Southern California, said.

“There’s no way that he’s going to be able to eliminate that gulf,” Schnur said. But, “maybe he can shrink it, just a little bit.”

Hence the memoir.

Book tour comes before campaign trail

“If a year from now, he’s campaigning in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and the local media includes one of these anecdotes along with the Getty stories, maybe it provides him opportunity with otherwise skeptical voters,” Schnur said.

Newsom is starting with more southern voters, according to Politico, which reported on Thursday that the governor will launch his book tour in Nashville, Tennessee, later this month.

News of Newsom’s book comes five months after former Vice President Kamala Harris’ memoir on her failed presidential campaign, Schnur noted, and a little more than a week after a memoir from Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro — another rumored 2028 candidate.

For Newsom, this week’s memoir headlines come as he continues to ride a high-profile national moment. In January, the governor made headlines during a trip to an economic conference in Davos, Switzerland — perhaps the most elite gathering there is — where he accused President Donald Trump of trying to silence him and then used his appearance to excoriate the president as an authoritarian.

Newsom’s effort, in conjunction with the California Legislature, to redraw the state’s political maps to counter Trump and Republicans’ efforts in Texas also continues to reverberate. On Wednesday, Newsom celebrated the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of Republicans’ appeal of that law.

Newsom’s book has been described by the journalists who’ve read it as leaning more toward the personal than the political, with the storytelling ending before his tenure as governor began.

Mentor Willie Brown expects an honest account

And that makes sense to former governor Gray Davis, a Newsom supporter who said the current governor operates off “pure guts” and the strength of his own convictions. Newsom is by any account an accomplished politician, as the two-term governor of the nation’s largest state and a global economic powerhouse, Davis said.

“He’s entitled to write a book about his life as he perceives it,” Davis said. “His challenges will come as a surprise to people; they will see his life was not just smooth as silk.”

Davis has not seen a copy of the book. Neither has Willie Brown, the longest-serving speaker of the California Assembly, who reportedly plays a big role in it. In his latter political act as mayor of San Francisco, Brown gave Newsom the appointment to the board of supervisors that started his political career.

“Newsom’s selection isn’t much of a surprise,” San Francisco Chronicle columnists wrote at the time. “He’s got the right look, the right political connections and money.”

Brown told The Bee that Newsom didn’t ask for the job. “I had to talk him into taking the job, frankly,” he said. Brown anticipates an accurate and not overstated memoir from his one-time political mentee, he said.

“He’s had a long time now to become acquainted with the voters and for them to become acquainted with him” Brown said. “I don’t know anything about him or his career that would be distasteful.”

But according to the published media reports, Newsom takes on in the book some of the public scars he accumulated over the course of his career. Those include a high-profile affair with the wife of his chief of staff, after his marriage to Guilfoyle ended, as well as his struggles with alcohol, according to the reporting on the book. He also describes his mother’s death, a medical suicide before the concept was legally sanctioned, in stark terms. “There was no peace that blanketed her,” Newsom writes in the book, according to Politico.

Some news accounts have noted omissions in the book. Newsom said baseball gave him the chance to attend Santa Clara University, the New York Times reported, but leaves out that he received a letter of recommendation from a family friend on the school’s board of regents, and another from former governor Jerry Brown. CalMatters has also previously reported that Newsom embellished his career with the college’s baseball team, a charge Newsom rebuffs.

But Willie Brown, the former mayor and speaker was not worried that Newsom would overly burnish his own story in his book. “In some cases they overstate,” Brown said of politicians who write biographies, “in some cases they understate, and in many cases they are not accurate. I’m sure he will say who he is.”

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