Perhaps, on the surface, one doesn’t automatically associate the names Joan Didion and Gavin Newsom. Oh sure, they’re both from California and proud to be (well, Didion ultimately seemed prouder of living in New York). And they both have long-standing roots in the state that go back generations (Didion a “fifth-generation” Californian and Newsom a “fourth-generation” one). This being the mark of a “real” Californian in their eyes. Or at least a more “pedigreed” one. But what links Didion and Newsom most in the wake of the latter releasing his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, is that they each have a knack for self-mythologizing.
Indeed, like Didion, Newsom—or rather, his ghostwriter, Mark Arax—knows how to cultivate lore around himself and his origin story. This is part of why the subtitle is: A Memoir of Discovery. Or, more accurately, Newsom is undergoing the process of self-discovery as he rehashes some of the more unpleasant details of his past (and yes, this definitely includes being married to Kimberly Guilfoyle, and doing that photoshoot with her for Harper’s Bazaaar in 2004). And, oftentimes, it can be difficult for the reader to ascertain just how many of those details are “objective” and how many are “stylized” for the sake of achieving the effect that Newsom wants. That effect, according to the cynics, being that he wants to seem “presidential” in time for a 2028 campaign.
But, to those with a less jaded lens, there’s something more to the book than that—a desire to be seen, known. Or at least as “known” as any politician can be, they being so often merely “whoever you want me to be” (to paraphrase Vivian Ward in Pretty Woman). But with Newsom, the clear aim is in wanting to assure everyone that he isn’t the “born with a silver spoon in his mouth” bloke whose penchant for privilege became extra glaring when he attended a lobbyist’s birthday party at The French Laundry in November of 2020, right after advising Californians to strictly adhere to the Covid guidelines that advocated for social distancing and mask-wearing. Worse still, certain members of the California Medical Association were also in attendance. All amounting to that usual hypocritical statement, “Do as I say, not as I do.”
At the same time, the backlash against Newsom for that little posh gathering was almost on par with the kind for a politician being embroiled in a sex scandal (in fact, Newsom appeared to get less flak for his 2005 affair with Ruby Rippey, who was married to Alex Tourk, Newsom’s friend, campaign manager and chief of staff). A reaction that seems to be part of his assessment in Young Man in a Hurry that there is “a particular visceral reaction I triggered in a subset of Californians [not to mention those living outside of California as well]. It wasn’t simply my politics that rubbed them the wrong way. It was my personage—my perceived privilege and how I spoke and walked through the world and even wore my hair—that would turn me into a different sort of lightning rod.” So instead, Newsom, with plenty of help from Arax (who is known for his own poetic nonfiction writing about California), turns himself into something else. A man for whom things did not come easily, despite the frequent mention of his ties to the Getty family (with none of other than Gordon Getty helping Newsom to finance PlumpJack, the wine business that would turn him into a bona fide entrepreneur of the distinctly California variety). Ties that will come up often in Young Man in a Hurry, with Newsom also acknowledging his eventual fallout with Billy Getty, his business partner and Gordon’s son.
But it’s in between Newsom’s attempts to “set the record straight” about himself that his Didion-esque stylings shine through in the prose. For example, commencing the book with what could be a simple sentence or two about living in Fair Oaks translates to, “All my life, the air I breathed blew in from the Pacific, the smell of sea and redwoods along the San Francisco coast. The bluff we now call home is rare high ground in the great flatland of the Central Valley. Our yard is studded with oaks and overlooks a river, the American, that carries a different scent. This is the river where the story of California—at least the Gold Rush version we like to tell ourselves, the shout of ‘Eureka! Eureka!’—began.” Of course, this is the kind of myth-perpetuating that Didion was fond of in her first novel centered on California (and, more specifically, her native city of Sacramento), Run River. Something she would later view as a kind of “false nostalgia” for the state that was spurred by her homesickness when she first moved to New York in 1956 after famously winning Vogue’s Prix de Paris essay contest. And, funnily enough, the very essay subject that secured her move to New York was California architecture. Namely, the architecture of William Wurster.
Didion’s love for and fascination with her “native state” is what led her back to it in 1964. Indeed, after marrying John Gregory Dunne (a decided East Coaster) at Mission San Juan Bautista in San Benito County, the two didn’t leave the state, settling into their L.A. lifestyle for the next twenty-four years before John Gregory Dunne suddenly decided he needed to get back to New York, blaming L.A. for, among other things, his creative slump. A “staleness,” as he described it, while, in the same breath, assuring, “Los Angeles is the one city in my life that I have ever truly loved.”
In that same Los Angeles Times article, Didion was sure to get across just how known she would become for unwittingly parading her champagne problems with a statement like, “You have no idea how much smaller a ten-room apartment in New York is than a ten-room house in Los Angeles.” The sort of sentiment that Newsom himself might get caught conveying. But not in Young Man in a Hurry. For, with Arax’s assistance, Newsom immediately weaves in the narrative of a fraught childhood, characterized by a sense of abandonment, displacement and generally feeling trapped between two worlds (his mother’s more “humble” one and his father’s and the Gettys’ more privileged one). All of this achieved in the span of pages one and two, when Newsom recounts, “Summer as a boy meant traversing the Sierra Nevada with my father, William Newsom, explorations that always carried added meaning because he left us when I was so young, for reasons that neither he nor my mother ever made clear. In those years when he was most alive, he was determined to pass on to me his veneration of California’s rivers and mountains.” A veneration that, as Newsom points out, has become more fraught, more loaded due to the ravages of climate change, which California has felt perhaps more acutely than any other state.
For Didion, however, the veneration became more “fraught” because, the older she got, the more she questioned how much of California was myth versus reality. How much of it was colored by her “romanticization” (and that of so many others presenting a romanticized vision of it) versus what she actually experienced. This being explored in 2003’s Where I Was From. A book that features an opening that essentially announces what Newsom’s purpose is with Young Man in a Hurry: “You will have perhaps realized by now that this book represents an exploration into my own confusions about the place and way in which I grew up, confusions as much about America as about California, misapprehensions and misunderstandings so much a part of who I became that I can still to this day only confront them obliquely.”
The same, in many regards, goes for Newsom, who can never quite get to the core of “who he is” because there’s still a lot in his personal life that he’s avoiding (apparently, has to avoid, if he’s to both keep functioning and avert more controversy). And so, like Didion, he tends to wrap up his own mythology into that of California’s. For instance, on tackling what it’s actually like to govern a state so vast and politically divergent (despite being viewed as “the People’s Republic of California”), Newsom remarks, “…you simply could not prepare for it. You had to wait until you were immersed in it to come up with a way to respond. The challenge was embedded in the geography of California itself, in the overreach of our settlers, who had taken a sprawling landmass—Death Valley near the bottom, redwood forest at the top, many different states of nature in between—and administered it as one state. When it came to governance, California was of a magnitude beyond that of New York, Florida or Texas. No model we played with could capture the reality of what we were about to face. The perpetual state of challenge and uncertainty would become its own sameness.”
A lyrical characterization of what it takes to govern, for sure, but not necessarily a very illuminating one for any reader that might actually have an interest in one day pursuing a role in California government. Of course, that kind of reader is not really who this book is “for.” And again, plenty of cynics will pronounce that the only person this book is for is Newsom himself (a theory further propelled by Newsom’s political action committee [a.k.a. PAC] bulk-buying upwards of 67,000 copies as part of the fulfillment of an incentive to donors to contribute any amount and still receive a free copy of the book). But perhaps who the book is truly aimed at is anyone interested in California. And, moreover, how it serves as a barometer for the rest of the U.S. It, like the latter, being so “schizophrenic” and fundamentally ununified as a direct result of its size.
And, talking of that word, “schizophrenic,” in a Vogue profile written by Maya Singer, she sums up the core of what Newsom wants people to believe about him (via this book) before the next presidential election arrives: “People assume Newsom comes from money. He doesn’t. Access, yes. Privilege, yes. Money, no. The most compelling aspect of Newsom’s biography is his schizophrenic upbringing, vis-à-vis wealth. After his parents’ divorce, his father seems not to have provided much financial support. Tessa Newsom, née Menzies, scrambled to keep the family afloat. Young Gavin chipped in, picking up a newspaper route and a job as a busboy. They took in foster kids because the government stipend helped pay the rent. Meanwhile, there were the Gettys.”
Ah yes, the Gettys. A family with the kind of money one would assume might make them vote Republican. But no, they’re more of that “liberal coastal elite” bent (when it suits them, of course). And, naturally, no one from that bloodline seemed interested in showing support (not openly anyway) for a certain Orange Creature. The creature that Newsom mentions or alludes to more than a few times in Young Man in a Hurry, noting (in that Didion manner), “Reading history helps me make sense of Trump, if nothing else. As extraordinary as pundits on both sides of cable news try to present him, he’s cut out of an old archetype. His compendium of lies emanates from a deeply American place, belonging to the tradition of folklore as much as it belongs to the manual of psychological disorders.” Newsom then adds, “He is an American manifestation, the peddler at our door. The more he stretches the truth in the name of the sale, the more desperate he becomes.”
Almost as desperate as Newsom is to better understand himself through his upbringing and the geographical place he grew up in. Another Didion staple—save for the fact that Didion was a dyed-in-the-wool Republican. Or “Goldwater Republican,” as it were. In fact, it was only after Republicans started embracing candidates like Richard Nixon (tragically, still the only president who can lay claim to being born in California) and Ronald Reagan that Didion decided to register as a Democrat, explaining in Political Fictions, “I was asked with somewhat puzzling frequency about my own politics, what they ‘were,’ or ‘where they came from,’ as if they were eccentric, opaque, somehow unreadable. They are not. They are the logical product of a childhood largely spent among conservative California Republicans (this was before the meaning of ‘conservative’ changed) in a postwar boom economy. The people with whom I grew up were interested in low taxes, a balanced budget, and a limited government. They believed above all that a limited government had no business tinkering with the private or cultural life of its citizens. In 1964, in accord with these interests and beliefs, I voted, ardently, for Barry Goldwater.”
As for Newsom’s early exposure to politics, it must have been somewhat obvious to him early on that his family had come from a long line of “centrist” Democrats. After all, how could one reconcile being both “liberal” and representing the interests of Getty Oil, as Newsom’s father, William Newsom III, did? Or, for that matter, reconcile marrying Guilfoyle. The answer? Being a “centrist” Democrat. To that point, in a 2009 article in The Economist, it was mentioned of Newsom’s stint as the mayor, “…in San Francisco, he is sometimes accused of conservatism.” It was that same article that prompted Newsom to title the book as he did, commenting, “In March 2009, my candidacy caught the curiosity of The Economist, the London-based weekly that had been pushing its ‘radical centrism’ since the 1840s. No expert on British mockery, I wasn’t sure what to make of the headline: YOUNG MAN IN A HURRY: GAVIN NEWSOM WANTS TO RUN CALIFORNIA, SERIOUSLY.”
And so, evidently taking a shine to that first part of the headline, Newsom repurposed it as a means to convey that he’s always had big ambitions, and often, ones that others couldn’t quite catch up to fast enough. For instance, while running PlumpJack, he controversially backed the decision to become the first Napa winery to replace corks with screw-top caps after the ongoing issue with cork taint reached a peak in 1997. A foreshadowing, in its way, of Newsom “pushing” for gay marriage “too soon” by instructing San Francisco’s City Hall to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples starting in February of 2004 (just one month after he was sworn in as the city’s mayor), causing an uproar not only among conservatives but also his own party (e.g., Dianne Feinstein and Barack Obama). In the end, the California Supreme Court halted any such marriage proceedings after a month and, by August of 2004, all of the marriage licenses issued were invalidated. Even so, it was a maneuver that sparked a larger debate about the human rights violations at play when it came to denying marriage to same-sex couples. Indeed, Newsom cited the California Constitution’s equal protection clause as giving him the authority to allow for such proceedings. A clause that would eventually make same-sex marriage both legal and protected in the state.
No doubt yet another “harbinger of doom” to the Fox News-loving conservatives of America. Though, as most know, Rupert Murdoch has made a large part of his living off of fearmongering about “Sodom and Gomorrah” cities like San Francisco and L.A. Something Newsom speaks on when he says, “California’s [so-called] moral decay has become practically a fetish of Murdoch.” He then adds, “If I find myself in the mood for California bashing, I much prefer the words of Bernard DeVoto, one of the West’s most eminent historians, who wrote that ‘California was almost entirely a dream, a dream vague but deep in the minds of westering people.’ They came with grit and ingenuity, a spirit to invent and reinvent.” In this regard, Devoto has a touch of the Didion flair for writing about California as well, with Newsom additionally noting, “Devoto… spent much of his life trying to explain the paradox of Californians to East Coast readers of Harper’s Magazine. In a 1946 essay titled ‘The Anxious West,’ he wrote, ‘[Californians] are the only Americans today who look toward the future with hope and confidence, and they ignore the elements in themselves which brings both into question. They are children of paradox and begetters of paradox.” A phrase that so perfectly sums up Didion and, according to his book, Newsom himself.
The self-mythologizing tendencies of both also tend to show up in their “preciousness” about their forebears. The grandparents and great-grandparents and even great-great grandparents who came before them to forge the path they would walk on. In Where I Was From, Didion immediately gets that message across with an elaborate backstory about her family that refers to her great-great-grandfather William Kilgore’s “crossing story.” That is, crossing over the Sierra Nevada to make a new home in California. His “pioneer spirit,” with its mix of hardened pragmatism and risk-taking, is characterized by Didion’s assessment of the average newly-arrived person in California: “Each arriving traveler had been, by definition, reborn in the wilderness, a new creature in no way the same as the man or woman or even child who had left…: the very decision to set forth on the journey had been a kind of death involving the total abandonment of all previous life, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters who would never again be seen, all sentiment banished…” In short, the very DNA of Californians—those who have a lineage in the state anyway—is imbued with that sense of constantly reinventing and adapting in order to survive in the very state that their forebears descended upon.
Newsom’s own sentimental outlook on the confluence of events that led his ascendants to California? “The Newsoms, hailing from the ridges and hills and rough pastures of County Cork, threw their own paradoxes—we were bards and priests, drunks and nobles—into the mix. There, in the mud of Yerba Buena, the land of the good herb, the Newsoms and Brennans joined hands with the Addises and Menzies.” And here it must be said that it is the privilege of the affluent, the well-to-do to be so concerned and consumed with their lineage, going both backward and forward (hence, Newsom’s book dedication, “To my wife, Jen, and to Montana, Hunter, Brooklynn and Dutch, my four children. May they carry on the story”). Yet another regard in which Didion and Newsom bear some similarity.
And while it was never known what Didion thought of Newsom, he made his own feelings about her apparent upon her passing in 2021, issuing an official statement from the Governor’s Office that read, “She was peerless in her capacity to write about life, loss, love and society—easily the best living writer in California. Her ability to put the tapestry of California and the times into words made her a treasure for her generation and generations to come. While we mourn this great loss, Californians can celebrate Joan’s tremendous contributions to the arts through her work. California belonged to Joan Didion…”
For a long time, it also belonged to Newsom, who must now “hand it over” to the next in line, Xavier Becerra. And, interestingly, Becerra stated during one of his first post-election win TV interviews, “If you want to know where a leader’s going to take you, know where they’ve come from.” And, clearly, Newsom wants people to know that where he comes from—mythologized or not—is a place that knows how to toggle between different interests and socioeconomic backgrounds. But, most significantly (as it was for Didion) and literally, that place is California. A milieu that Didion describes in Where I Was From as a “settlement [that] had tended to attract drifters of loosely entrepreneurial inclination, the hunter-gatherers of the frontier rather than its cultivators, and to reward most fully those who perceived most quickly that the richest claim of all lay not in the minefields but in Washington.” Newsom has already been accordingly rewarded. Though it remains to be seen if that reward will also include the full-fledged entrée into Washington that is the presidency.