Gavin Newsom’s memoir reaches the top of the bestseller list hours after its release

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Gavin Newsom’s new memoir has reached the top of the bestseller lists just hours after it was published online.

A Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery Described as “an intimate and poignant account of identity, belonging and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics,” the book comes amid speculation that the California governor is considering a run for president in 2028.

Newsom’s book was released on February 24, and is currently at the top of Amazon’s list of political biographies and in the top five on the site’s best-selling memoirs list as of this writing.

Newsom has made headlines in recent months for his confrontation with Donald Trump and his grand plans to stop the so-called “shooting exodus” in Hollywood. The governor has pledged to bring television and film production back to California, and signed a bill last year that would double the state’s tax incentives for film and television projects from $330 million to $750 million annually. However, Newsom has faced his fair share of detractors — even from Hollywood insiders — on issues outside the industry.

In October, Joseph Gordon-Levitt said the governor was “too afraid” to veto legislation that would have banned companies from making AI chatbots available to people under 18 (Newsom attributed his decision to the “broad restrictions” imposed by the bill, though he did sign a law requiring platforms to remind users that they are interacting with chatbots and not humans, as well as preventing the promotion of self-harm content). Meanwhile, Halle Berry criticized Newsom in December for vetoing a menopause bill she supported, adding: “That’s OK, because he’s not going to be governor forever, and the way he’s ignoring women… he probably shouldn’t be our next president either.”

The new book was written with the benefit of hindsight to respond to criticism, but it nonetheless seeks to position Newsom as an underdog, who took up baseball as a way to deal with the dysfunction in his family and his long struggle with dyslexia. The main theme of Newsom’s memoir is: This is just a guy who lived his whole life trying to make his country proud.

“Born in San Francisco, his parents divorced at an early age, and he spent his childhood 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, introduced Newsom into San Francisco society, a world of wealth and connections,” the book’s description reads. “The dissonance was frustrating, made all the more difficult by his undiagnosed dyslexia, but the perspective was valuable: He had inherited not only its mother’s perseverance and his father’s reverence for California, but its opportunity.”

In fact, Newsom has never lived outside of California, something that endeared him to locals and left him vulnerable to criticism from potential voters in the rest of the country. The 58-year-old also memorably witnessed the GOP-led recall effort in 2021.

For Newsom, the “California Dream” is what keeps him going, publishers’ notes say. “His great-grandfather, a policeman, walked in San Francisco, where nearly 150 years later, Newsom would be elected mayor, following the values ​​instilled in him by his family history: that California’s open arms should continue to extend to each new generation,” the description reads.

Of course, the book chronicles Newsom’s entire political career, including his stint as mayor of San Francisco, where he issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples more than 10 years before the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage. The book also praises his “bold efforts” to “combat climate change, improve mental health care, and promote gun safety.”

As the book description states, Newsom’s memoir is “a searingly resilient California story about identity, belonging, and the defining moments that inspired a life in politics.”

Read and purchase Gavin Newsom’s new memoir here.