Five years ago I knew exactly what kind of book I had to write.
It would map crisis and conflict – the pandemic, the catastrophic wildfires, Trump 1.0, the relentless flywheel of California politics grinding down public policy. It would be the book people expected me to write.
I proudly submitted the manuscript.
It was quickly rejected.
I still remember the Zoom call with Ann Godoff, the legendary editor-in-chief of Penguin Press. I assumed she would tell me to shorten the personal material—that the first chapter about my childhood was unnecessary or self-indulgent. I started doing some preventive editing in my head.
“I’ll take out 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 was not a policy book. It became a memoir instead – and not the kind I had imagined. The subtitle: “A memoir of discovery,” was not made for effect. It describes what happened to me during the writing process.
When I looked back on my childhood, I assumed I understood. I didn’t. I thought I understood my parents’ story well – of the split between my father’s job and my mother’s. I didn’t.
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My father, William Newsom III, was an intellectual, lawyer, judge and a close friend of Gordon Getty, the heir to a large oil fortune. They had met in high school. My grandfather, William II, was a builder, a shrewd political player and a friend of California Governor Pat Brown. He was sometimes called “Boss Newsom.” For my father, this world offered access to power and privilege, but not to 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 it endlessly can become a trap in itself.
I started digging – and discovered interviews my father had given at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. It was enlightening to hear him explain in his own voice why he left our family. I had grown up with fragments and assumptions. Hearing his story forced me to reconsider memories that I thought had been resolved.
On my mother’s side it was even more amazing. She never talked about her childhood. She never spoke of 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 spoke about the alcoholism, the secrets, the generational trauma that shaped her.
These were no minor footnotes. They were structural beams. And I never really asked about 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 that 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 courage and self-reliance. I thought I understood that tension. I had even built a character to survive it.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and primary partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom embrace during a campaign event in support of Proposition 50 in San Francisco on November 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 an armor: professional, polished, controlled. I thought it was a force. 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 policed. “You have to break yourself open,” he said.
That meant confronting things I had been avoiding. Recognizing that my mother’s dire warnings about entering politics were not abstract. Admittedly, during the 2021 recall, the humiliation felt visceral. Recognizing that at times I had been too self-centered to see how my ambitions affected the people closest to me. Accepting my insecurities instead of 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 it endlessly can become a trap in itself.
Writing this book changed that equation for me. It has not made me less ambitious or less committed. It helped me see that the grit that people associate with drive can be traced 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 brings responsibility.
Ultimately, I wrote this book for my children.
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If it finds an audience, I’ll be grateful. If not, that’s fine. I can’t control that. What I can do is make sure 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 I want to live in 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 opposites.
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This book is not an argument. It’s not a refutation. It’s an attempt to tell a fuller story – one that recognizes both the gains I’ve had and the fractures that shaped me.
We are all more complicated than the caricatures attached to our names. Writing this memoir forced me to confront myself – to discover the real origin story that lies beneath the surface of all of us.
CLICK HERE TO VAN GOV. GAVIN NIEUWSOM
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