Gavin Newsom Memoir Hits Top of Best-Sellers Chart Hours After Release
The new book seeks to position Newsom as an underdog, who has lived his whole life trying to make his home state proud.
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Potential Democratic presidential candidate and governor Gavin Newsom during stop No. 3 of his nationwide book tour for 'Young Man in a Hurry' in Rock Hill, South Carolina. Peter Zay/Anadolu via Getty Images
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Gavin Newsom‘s new memoir has shot to the top of the best-sellers charts just hours after its release online.
Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery is billed as an “intimate and poignant account of identity, belonging, and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics,” and the book comes amid speculation that the California Governor is considering a 2028 presidential run.
Released Feb. 24, Newsom’s book is currently at the top of Amazon’s political biographies chart and in the Top Five of the site’s best-selling memoirs chart as of this writing.
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HARDCOVER VERSION
Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery
$26.40 $30 12% off
Released by Penguin Press, the book is available now as a 304-page hardcover. Newsom also narrates the audiobook version of “Young Man in a Hurry,” which you can listen to for free right now with a free trial to Audible here.
Newsom has made headlines in recent months both for squaring off with Donald Trump and for his grand plans to halt Hollywood’s so-called “filming exodus.” The governor has pledged to return television and movie production to California, signing a bill last year that would double the state’s tax incentives for film and TV projects from $330 million to $750 million annually. Still, Newsom has faced his fair share of detractors — even from Hollywood insiders — on issues outside of the industry.
In October, Joseph Gordon Levitt said the governor was “too scared” to veto legislation that would have banned companies from making AI chatbots available to people under the age of 18 (Newsom attributed his decision to the bill’s “broad restrictions,” though he did sign a law that requires platforms to remind users they are interacting with a chatbot and not a human, as well as prevent the promotion of self-harm content). Halle Berry, meantime, criticized Newsom in December for vetoing a menopause bill she backed, adding that, “That’s OK, because he’s not going to be governor forever, and the way he has overlooked women … he probably should not be our next president either.”
The new book was written too late to respond to the criticisms, but nevertheless seeks to position Newsom as an underdog, who took up baseball as a way to deal with his family dysfunction and his longtime struggles with dyslexia. The running theme throughout Newsom’s memoir: This is just a guy who has lived his whole life trying to make his home state proud.
“Born in San Francisco, his parents divorced at a young age, and his childhood was spent being tugged between two worlds: his mother worked three jobs in order to care for her children while his father, a close friend of the Getty family, brought Newsom into San Francisco society, a world of wealth and connections,” reads a book description. “The dissonance was frustrating, and made all the more difficult because of undiagnosed dyslexia, but the vantage point was valuable: he inherited his mother’s perseverance and his father’s reverence of California, not only its wildness, but its opportunity.”
For what it’s worth, Newsom has never lived outside of California — something that has both endeared him to locals and left him open to critique from potential voters in the rest of the country. The 58-year-old also memorably saw off a GOP-led recall effort in 2021.
For Newsom, “the California Dream” is what keeps him going, the publishers’ notes say. “His great-great-grandfather, a cop, walked a beat in San Francisco, where almost 150 years later, Newsom would be elected as mayor, running on the values instilled in him by his family history: that California’s open arms must continue to extend to each new generation,” a description reads.
Of course, the book chronicles Newsom’s entire political career, including his time as mayor of San Francisco, where he issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples more than 10 years before the Supreme Court made same-sex unions legal. The book also lauds his “bold efforts” to “counter climate change, improve mental health care, and enhance gun safety.”
AUDIOBOOK VERSION
Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery
Download or stream the audiobook version of Newsom’s memoir with a free trial to Audible here.
As the book description states, Newsom’s memoir is a “deeply resilient California story of identity, belonging, and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics.”
Read and buy Gavin Newsom’s new memoir here.
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