GOV GAVIN NEWSOM: From privilege to heartbreak, my life behind the headlines

Five years ago, I knew exactly what kind of book I needed to write.

It would chronicle crisis and conflict — the pandemic, the catastrophic wildfires, Trump 1.0, the relentless flywheel of California politics grinding out public policy. It would be the book people expected me to write.

I proudly turned in the manuscript.

It was quickly rejected.

I still remember the Zoom call with Ann Godoff, the legendary editor-in-chief at Penguin Press. I assumed she would tell me to trim the personal material — that the early chapter about my childhood was unnecessary or self-indulgent. I started preemptively editing in my head.

“I’ll pull the biographical parts,” I said.

She stopped me.

“That’s the part I care about,” she replied. “I didn’t know any of this about you.”

What followed wasn’t a policy book. It became, instead, a memoir — and not the kind I imagined. The subtitle, “A Memoir of Discovery,” wasn’t crafted for effect. It describes what happened to me during the writing process.

When I began revisiting my childhood, I assumed I understood it. I didn’t. I thought I had a firm grasp of my parents’ story — of the split between my father’s orbit and my mother’s. I didn’t.

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My father, William Newsom III, was an intellectual, a lawyer, a judge and a close friend of Gordon Getty, the heir to a great oil fortune. They’d met in high school. My grandfather, William II, was a builder, a shrewd political operator and a friend of California Gov. Pat Brown. He was sometimes called “Boss Newsom.” For my father, this world provided access to power and privilege but not wealth. He was a friend and sometimes an employee.

For years, I believed that if I worked harder, responded faster and explained more clearly, I could reshape public perception. But caricatures persist because they serve a purpose. Fighting them endlessly can become a trap in itself.

I began digging — and uncovered interviews my father had given to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. Listening to him explain, in his own voice, why he left our family was illuminating. I had grown up with fragments and assumptions. Hearing his account forced me to reconsider memories I thought were settled.

On my mother’s side, it was even more startling. She never talked about her childhood. She never talked about what my aunts later described to me as a “house of horrors.” She never talked about the gun her father put to her head as a little girl. She never talked about his suicide. She never talked about the alcoholism, the secrets, the generational trauma that shaped her.

These weren’t minor footnotes. They were structural beams. And I had never truly asked about any of it.

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For most of my early life, I navigated two worlds. There was my father’s proximity to privilege and influence, to the California political machine his own father helped build, to the Getty dinner tables and to his books. And then my mother’s quieter, more disciplined world, rooted in grit and self-reliance. I thought I understood that tension. I had even built a persona to survive it.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom embrace during a campaign event in support of Proposition 50 in San Francisco on Nov. 3, 2025. (Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

There’s a line in the book about plaster crumbling. That wasn’t metaphorical. That was real. I had built armor — professional, polished, controlled. I thought it was a strength. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it was fear.

Mark Arax, who worked closely with me on the book, put it plainly: If this was going to be a memoir, it couldn’t be guarded. “You’ve got to crack yourself open,” he said.

That meant confronting things I had avoided. Acknowledging that my mother’s dire warnings about going into politics were not abstract. Admitting that during the recall effort in 2021, humiliation felt visceral. Recognizing that I had sometimes been too self-absorbed to see how my ambitions affected the people closest to me. Accepting my insecurities rather than masking them.

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For years, I believed that if I worked harder, responded faster and explained more clearly, I could reshape public perception. But caricatures persist because they serve a purpose. Fighting them endlessly can become a trap in itself.

Writing this book changed that equation for me. It didn’t make me less ambitious or less committed. It helped me see that the grit people associate with drive traces back to my mother. That my family challenged convention long before I entered politics.

It also reminded me that telling your own story means telling stories that involve others — parents, mentors, friends, children. That carries responsibility.

In the end, I wrote this book for my kids.

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If it finds an audience, I’m grateful. If it doesn’t, that’s fine. I can’t control that. What I can do is ensure that Montana, Hunter, Brooklyn and Dutch know more than the headlines. They deserve to understand the full arc — the doubts, the mistakes, the sweaty hands, the resilience, the contradictions. They deserve the context behind public life.

I can choose whether to live inside a flattened version of myself or tell the more complicated truth: I have been blessed by extraordinary relationships, and I have also been shaped by hardship and conflict. I am the sum of those contradictions.

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This book isn’t an argument. It isn’t a rebuttal. It’s an attempt to tell a fuller story — one that acknowledges both the advantages I’ve had and the fractures that shaped me.

We’re all more complicated than the caricatures attached to our names. Writing this memoir forced me to confront myself — to uncover the real origin story that lies beneath the surface of us all.

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