Gavin Newsom ridiculed for desperately painting himself as living fraught and penniless childhood in new memoir… despite his family’s millionaire connections

Gavin Newsom has portrayed his childhood as financially fraught in a new memoir, despite his family connections with powerful politicians and billionaire oil magnates. 

Instead of politics, the California Governor’s 2026 book focuses on the struggles of his parents’ divorce, growing up with dyslexia, and working as a paper boy, according to the New York Times which received an advance copy of the autobiography. 

The likely Democratic contender for the next presidential election spent his childhood surrounded by some of the most powerful families in California, who backed his early business ventures and greased the wheels of his political ascent. 

His father, William Newsom, was a wealthy state appeals judge who introduced him to the Getty Oil executives he represented in court, while his aunt Barbara Newsom was married to Ron Pelosi, the brother-in-law of US Representative Nancy Pelosi.  

Yet his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, which is set to hit the shelves February 24, portrays him as a teenager who delivered newspapers because money was scarce at home. 

Newsom, 58, presents his parents’ divorce in the early 1970s when he was three years old as a landmark moment in his life, saying his mother, Tessa Thomas, worked several jobs to maintain their middle-class lifestyle following the split. 

Thomas raised Newsom and his sister in a San Francisco home now worth around $3.6 million and later in affluent Marin County. She worked three jobs to support her family, and while they were well-connected, they didn’t always have spare cash. 

Meanwhile, his distant but business-minded father introduced him to political heavyweights and wealthy oil magnates behind the scenes. 

These ties helped grow Newsom’s corner wine shop business into a chain of restaurants, bars, and an alpine resort. 

However, the California Democrat sees these helping hands as detrimental to his desired narrative, describing his ‘entry into the Getty world’ as ‘robbing me of my own hard-earned story’. 

He said his childhood wasn’t easy – describing himself as an awkward high schooler with a bowl cut and a lisp who was tormented by a bully who called him ‘Newscum’, the same insult used against him by Donald Trump decades later. 

The politician also struggled with dyslexia, and tried to compensate by memorizing a list of pretentious words he still uses today.  

Newsom emphasizes his hard-working ethos doing minimum wage jobs as a teenager as more of a factor in his rise to political fame than the help he had on the way. 

He played baseball and basketball in high school, and he wrote that as a young athlete, he was ‘the first guy at practice and the last guy to leave’.

Newsom said that as a busboy, he was so committed that a customer gave him a $20 tip. When his uncle hired him to deliver shoe inserts, customers said they had ‘never had a delivery boy who showed such speed and politeness’, according to his book.

He also details his resentment against his father, who served as an appellate judge in California, for leaving the family and being emotionally unavailable throughout his childhood. 

However, several powerful figures swept in to teach him the ways of the world, including oil titan Gordon Getty who encouraged him to take risks in business, and Willie Brown, the former mayor of San Francisco, who schooled him in politics. 

Newsom descends from a long line of political heavyweights in San Francisco, while Nancy Pelosi’s nieces and nephews are his cousins. 

Influential former Congressman John Burton supported his basketball games from the bleachers during his high school years, and Getty took him and his sister on vacations including a safari trip to Africa while he was visiting the Spanish monarchy. 

The book comes as Newsom is expected to make a bid to become the Democratic presidential contender during a pivotal midterm election year, but there is little mention of the current president or recent politics.   

A number of longtime Newsom observers in California have previously called his tale of childhood woes a farce.

‘He talks about his poor mother, working her fingers to the bone, as if he went barefoot to school,’ Dan Walters, a columnist with CalMatters who has covered California politics for 50 years, told the Daily Mail.

‘Yeah, barefoot to private school in Marin County.’

Kevin Dalton, a political activist and longtime critic of Newsom, claims the governor tailors his story to fit his audience.

‘He’s a chameleon and will bend and shapeshift and change colors, you know, whatever suits his current environment,’ Dalton told the Daily Mail.

‘You can hear it with his speech, you can hear it with his stories. He’s never once talked about eating Wonder Bread and mac and cheese, but all of a sudden he’s in a room with a bunch of ex-NBA ballers and this stuff starts coming up. It’s perfect.’

Newsom has four children with his ex-wife, documentary filmmaker Jennifer Lynn Siebel.

According to Growing Up Getty by James Reginato, the Newsoms, Harrises, Pelosis and Gettys are godparents to each others offspring and continue to make appearances at important family events.   

Newsom is the godfather of of designer, model, and LGBTQ rights activist Nats Getty.