The lives of recent U.S. presidents are dominated by absent or distant fathers. Bill Clinton lost his before birth, and then grew up with an alcoholic stepfather who loved him but lacked self-control. George W. Bush grew up in H.W.’s shadow—one so strong that his brother Jeb tried to run for president, too. Barack Obama writes of being haunted by a father who had passed on nothing but his skin color, his imagined voice “untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval.” Fred Trump was cold and controlling, and vicious to Donald’s older brother, Freddy, who did not want to follow him into real estate. Inevitably, you wonder: Did these men look to voters to give them what their own father could not?Compared with some on this roll call, Gavin Newsom’s father was practically a saint. But the California governor’s new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry—a book that doubles as table stakes for his presidential run—is dominated by Bill Newsom’s emotional distance. He leaves Gavin’s mother, Tessa Menzies, in San Francisco when her two kids are young, and moves 200 miles to Lake Tahoe. He is a great reader, whereas the young Gavin has undiagnosed dyslexia. Bill’s primary relationship is not with his family but his drinking buddies, who call themselves the “Lonely Hearts Club.” In 2018, Gavin wins the race to become California governor and fulfills his father’s dream (Bill ran twice for office, unsuccessfully). Yet his dying father, even when prompted by a caretaker, cannot tell his son that he loves him. “He would not utter those words,” Newsom writes. “And yet I had not one ounce of doubt that he loved me dearly.”[Read: The front-runner]In Dreams From My Father, Obama’s sense of outsiderishness comes from his skin color, which made him an oddity in Hawaii and Harvard. Young Man in a Hurry substitutes status anxiety for race. This is a memoir about growing up next to immense privilege, thanks to the Newsom family’s friendship with the oil-rich Gettys, while knowing that it could be taken away at any moment. This insecurity might be the perfect preparation for American politics, where navigating relationships with big-money donors without letting them own you is an essential skill.The late Bill Newsom first met the petroleum heir Gordon Getty when both were students at St. Ignatius College Preparatory School in San Francisco. (The future California governor Jerry Brown was also among their friends.) For Bill, what followed was a life caught between roles: Gavin describes his father as providing the socially awkward Gordon with a bridge to the outside world, yet he was also his employee.In one telling incident, Gavin’s older sister, Hilary, called their benefactor “Gordon” while traveling first-class on the Getty dime: “He shot back a look of reproach: ‘I’m Mr. Getty,’ he said.” Hilary, then 8 or 9, burst into tears and ran to her father for comfort. Bill said nothing. “Back then, I did not understand my father’s silence,” Newsom writes. “It appeared to me a swallowing of pride, one more abrogation of fatherly duty.” At the same time, the elder Newsom was closer and more relaxed with Gordon’s four sons than his own children: “‘Uncle Bill’ was a role that came naturally to him. Dad? Not so easy.”Gordon Getty, who is now 92, devoted his life to composing classical music and operas, but he also controlled the family’s financial trust, ensuring that everyone else had to dance to his tune. When Gavin Newsom went into business with Gordon’s second son, Billy, they secured an investment from the older man—and called their wine shop PlumpJack, after one of his operas, in return.[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]This story is usually told as part of the “Prince Gavin” narrative that so vexes Newsom, “this perception of privilege and wealth that has dogged me—and at times infuriated, not just frustrated, me,” he told me last fall. But Young Man in a Hurry presents a less well-known coda to the PlumpJack narrative. After Billy gets married in 1999, he becomes convinced that Newsom is stiffing him and orders a forensic audit of the business. Gordon essentially takes Gavin’s side, buying out Billy, and the friendship between the two younger men never recovers. In the aftermath of this breakup, Newsom reflects that Billy had offered him a deal similar to the one Gordon offered his father: to live a “millionaire’s lifestyle” by taking Getty money—and acting as a courtier. Despite the cautionary example provided by his father, Newsom took a long time to realize that he had been on the same path.Until his falling-out with Billy, Newsom had never considered the possibility that his “deeper entry into the Getty world would rob me of my own hard-earned story, a theft that would become one of the very reasons for writing this book.” Good luck with that. Without taking away from Newsom’s work ethic, this memoir cannot help underlining how much his smooth upward assent has been greased by family connections. His first proper job, selling orthotic shoe inserts, is at his uncle Paul’s company. His next one, with the real-estate titan Walter Shorenstein, is arranged by his dad. Meanwhile, he moved into the Getty mansion rent-free with Billy’s brother Andrew “in return for our keeping an eye on the contractors and handling the shipments of artwork that arrived regularly from Sotheby’s.” Then comes PlumpJack.In his description of the Gettys, Newsom reminds me of Tom Wambsgans, of HBO’s Succession, who marries into the powerful Roy family and only narrowly dodges being made the fall guy for a corporate scandal, because a son-in-law is not as important as a son. There’s also an echo of the Prince Harry of Spare, who realizes that the British royal family will always choose to protect his brother, the future king, over him.Spare notoriously benefited from a talented ghostwriter (J. R. Moehringer, who also co-wrote Andre Agassi’s best-selling memoir), and Newsom has made an equally good choice: the journalist Mark Arax, author of several books about California under his own name. The clean prose, self-criticism, and psychological insight give Young Man in a Hurry a reason to exist beyond legitimizing a book tour through the early-primary and swing states. As candidate memoirs go, it’s a much better read than Ron DeSantis’s 2023 offering, The Courage to Be Free, in which the only memorable anecdote has young Ron turning up at Yale in jean shorts, an incident that spurred his lifelong hatred of snooty elites.Newsom’s first experience of public office comes when another of his father’s friends, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, appoints him as chair of the city’s parking and traffic commission. In an anecdote that could feature in the dictionary under “entitlement,” Newsom recounts that he turned up at city hall for the swearing-in ceremony thinking that Brown had appointed him to the film commission. That presumably requires a somewhat different skill set from parking, although neither of them obviously flowed from his experience as a wine merchant.His initial entry to the city’s Board of Supervisors was also as a Brown appointee. When he makes an unwise comment in the run-up to his swearing-in, taking a different position from Brown on the relocation of a stadium, he gets a call from State Senator John Burton, “a confidant to Mayor Brown and a pal of my father,” who chides him for undermining Brown. Newsom promptly changes his position. I mean, we all know this is how politics works, but seeing it written down in a book by someone pitching to be president is quite something. With Brown placated, Newsom is sworn in as a supervisor. By his father.Although Newsom is intermittently aware of his great privileges, the occasional unselfconscious sentence slips out. “Photography became my safe space, a place where I could both observe and create,” he writes of his childhood vacations with the Gettys. “Dad later blew up two of my pictures and sold them for four hundred dollars each at an auction to benefit his foundation to protect the California mountain lion.” I love the implicit assumption here that a “foundation to protect the California mountain lion” is simply something that fathers have. Mine has strong opinions on the urinary habits of the cat next door, but that doesn’t feel quite the same.The dominant colors of this memoir are black and gold. Black for the Getty oil, but also the intense darkness of Newsom’s family background. His maternal grandmother was anorexic. His grandfather’s hellish experiences as a prisoner in Japanese captivity during World War II overwhelmed him, and he took his own life. Two cousins die in a house fire as children. Young Gavin and Hilary go to a toy shop with John Paul Getty III, who had recently been kidnapped and had his ear sliced off and sent to his family. (Despite their father’s injunction not to mention the ear deficit, Hilary blurts out: “Paul, how many ears do you have?”) Late in the book, Newsom makes a glancing reference to his father’s “long stretches of depression.” When Newsom meets his future second wife, Jennifer, he learns of her own tragic past: When she was 6, the golf cart she was playing in reversed over and killed her sister Stacey. As an adult, she was one of four women who testified in court in 2022 that Harvey Weinstein had sexually assaulted them. (Jennifer’s case ended in a mistrial.) In 2020, at the age of 46, she had an unexpected pregnancy that failed, requiring a surgical ablation of her uterus. “Thank goodness this was California,” Newsom writes, adding: “Jen received the healthcare that would very soon be denied to countless women in red-state America because of the decision of Supreme Court Justices Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch and Barrett.”[Read: Trust is a stylish, hollow spectacle]Gold is for the Getty money, but also the charmed life of California high society. You want celebrity name-drops? Young Man in a Hurry has got you covered. The young Gavin goes on holiday with the Gettys to meet the king and queen of Spain. Arthur Miller turns up at Thanksgiving in Barbados, because of course he does. Newsom’s aunt Cindy produced Sister Act. He gets a preview of the iPhone from Steve Jobs at a party, alongside Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When his baby daughter won’t settle, Newsom—by then aspiring to be governor—takes her for a walk into the center of San Francisco and runs into a concert by Paul McCartney. Inevitably the Beatle ends up serenading her. The local newspaper editor who fishes around the story that Newsom might be Gordon Getty’s illegitimate son is also—why not?—Sharon Stone’s husband. His whole family has this Forrest Gump–like quality of turning up wherever exciting things are happening. Newsom’s great-grandfather Thomas Addis cured the Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling of Bright’s disease. His grandmother Jean studied method acting under Stanislavski. Around page 180, I wanted to dig up my own relatives and berate them for not being more interesting.One of the book’s most arresting scenes comes in 2018 when, as governor-elect, Newsom first meets Donald Trump in person after wildfires in California. On Marine One, Trump tells a story about how he tried to set up his daughter Ivanka with the NFL quarterback Tom Brady, only to discover that she was already dating some schmuck whose father had just got out of prison. This schmuck is Jared Kushner, who is sitting right there as his father-in-law laments what his daughter could have had. “In front of the governor and future governor of California, Trump was making his son-in-law feel two feet tall,” Newsom writes. “And Kushner just let him do it.” Trump, in Newsom’s telling, is yet another controlling patriarch whose approval is impossible to win.Newsom is often accused of being an empty suit—all teeth and hair gel. This memoir is surprisingly open about why that might be, framing the politician as a lost soul always searching for a stable identity. (Perhaps this is an inherited trait: There are two passing references to his mother sometimes slipping into an English accent, after watching My Fair Lady in college.) The young Gavin tries on various personas. As a child, he wants to be a magician, the “Great Gavini.” As a teenager, he dresses like the rogueish TV charlatan Remington Steele, as played by Pierce Brosnan. He goes through a phase of listening to tapes of the self-improvement coach Tony Robbins on Andrew Getty’s Walkman. When he takes Jen back to his apartment for the first time, the undecorated pad reminds her of Patrick Bateman’s home in American Psycho, a book about a charming psychopath with slicked-back hair who has absolutely no idea who he really is.[Read: Gavin Newsom’s record is a problem]Not having a strong sense of identity means that he can get pushed around in his personal life. As the mayor of San Francisco, he poses sprawled on a carpet for Harper’s Bazaar—a picture of cringe-making arrogance that still haunts him—because his then-wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and his patron Ann Getty tell him to do so. “You have a pattern of letting the women in your life dictate your movements,” Newsom recalls his sister Hilary telling him. Then she adds, with no apparent self-awareness, “Had I been there, I would have told you: ‘Get your ass off the floor. You’re the mayor of San Francisco. That is not a good look.’”Newsom’s various constituents feature only lightly in this book—we encounter the city meter maids he fought for as parking commissioner, although his great innovation in improving their lives seems to be changing their title to parking control officer. His bold (and vindicated) decision to push for gay marriage as mayor of San Francisco is rehashed here, along with the subsequent backlash from the rest of the Democratic Party. The main section of the book ends with his election as governor in 2018, which spares us a gearchange into glossy PR for his record in that office, but also means we don’t get Newsom’s defense of his COVID record or his management of California’s budget. Immediately after a brief section on his affair with the wife of an aide, which took place when he was mayor, the book oddly backs up to discuss his grandparents. The alcohol problems on which he blamed the affair merit only a few sentences, and do not seem to be an ongoing part of his life. (He now drinks socially.) His mother’s death is movingly told, with commendable honesty about how he withdrew from her rather than face her illness. The lone unembroidered mention of “my longtime friend Kamala Harris” might be the single shadiest line in the book.At the end, though, it all comes back to Bill. Young Man in a Hurry ends with Newsom in his study, contemplating his late father’s journal, which he glances at—“May 26, 2002: ‘Tessa died in San Francisco last week and we buried her in Dutch Flat’”—but cannot bring himself to read. Perhaps, for a man who has always lived in the shadow of distant patriarchs, the only thing worse than perpetually wondering what his father really thought would be finding out for sure.