Gavin Newsom says he knew his marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle was finished when he watched same-sex couples exchange vows in San Francisco City Hall. Not because of any political revelation, but because of what he saw in those marriages that he couldn't find in his own.
The California governor's new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, recounts the moment with the kind of self-aware solemnity that politicians typically reserve for concession speeches. In 2004, Newsom defied both state and federal law to allow same-sex couples to marry in San Francisco. Watching those ceremonies, something clicked.
"I saw something in those marriages that I did not see in my own."
It's the kind of line that practically begs to be the centerpiece of a book tour. And for Newsom, whose memoir is widely seen as a precursor for a 2028 presidential bid, every anecdote in this book is doing double duty.
Newsom and Guilfoyle married in December 2001 at St. Ignatius Church, with a reception at the Getty mansion, a venue tied to the family whose trust Newsom's father administered, the Daily Mail reported. The pairing looked like political royalty in the making. San Francisco's youngest mayor and a telegenic legal commentator. The "new Kennedys," as Newsom himself frames it.
But the fairy tale had skeptics from the start. Newsom's sister Hilary had reservations about the match, and she wasn't quiet about them.
"She was smart, quite smart, but not my type of gal. She was a little over-the-top. Overdone style. She was never not put together, but understatement was not one of her attributes."
Hilary also pointed out an imbalance that apparently everyone could see except the groom.
"I saw a lot of adoration from her to you, Gavin. But less from you to her."
Even Newsom's mother, Tessa, who put on a good smile at the wedding, privately believed the marriage wouldn't last. She chose to hide those feelings from her son, at least until near the end of her life. Tessa, then just 55, ended her life in 2002 via doctor-assisted suicide after battling aggressive metastatic breast cancer. Shortly before, she had found the courage to speak plainly.
"She had visited a day earlier, only to have my mother scold her about things she'd seen in our marriage. Kimberly left in tears."
Newsom's reflection on that moment carries a note of admiration: "Mom had finally found a voice, it seemed."
Three days after Newsom was sworn in as mayor, Guilfoyle flew to New York to start a new job as a host for Court TV. The physical distance mirrored something deeper. As Newsom describes it, her career path would take her to Fox News and into circles of right-wing politics that "could not have contrasted more with the world in which we were raised."
This is where the memoir gets politically convenient. Newsom frames the dissolution of his marriage partly as an ideological divergence, positioning himself as the principled progressive while his ex-wife drifted rightward. It's a tidy narrative for a man selling himself to Democratic primary voters.
But Newsom also admits something less flattering about himself.
"I gave only a little of myself to Kimberly. Instead of regretting this, I kept wishing I could have given a lot more to my dying mother."
They announced their divorce in January 2005. Newsom writes that when it was time to part after four years of marriage, "we parted about as amicably as two people could." He also concedes that the period of bachelorhood that followed was something he "did not handle with discernment." A rare understatement from a man writing a 2028 campaign document disguised as a memoir.
The trajectories that followed the divorce tell a story of their own. Newsom married actress and documentary filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom in 2008. The couple has four children. His career arc bent through the lieutenant governor's office and into the governor's mansion, with the White House now clearly in his sights.
Guilfoyle's path took her deeper into conservative media and eventually into the orbit of the Trump family. She dated Donald Trump Jr. from 2018 to 2024, and the couple was eventually engaged. President Donald Trump named Guilfoyle ambassador to Greece, even as news of Trump Jr.'s new relationship with Palm Beach socialite Bettina Anderson was becoming public. Trump Jr. and Anderson are now set to be wed.
Among those married during San Francisco's "winter of love" in 2004 were Rosie O'Donnell and Kelli Carpenter. They have since divorced. The symbolism practically writes itself: Newsom's great act of political defiance produced marriages with roughly the same shelf life as his own.
The timing and content of this book leave little to the imagination. Newsom is building a narrative, and it requires him to be both vulnerable and strategically positioned. The same-sex marriage anecdote is perfect for a Democratic primary audience. It casts him as an early champion of a cause that is now party orthodoxy, while simultaneously explaining his failed marriage in terms that flatter his political evolution.
What's missing is any sustained accountability for his own role in the marriage's failure. His sister saw the imbalance. His mother saw the problems. Newsom himself admits he gave "only a little" of himself. Yet the memoir's framing, at least as excerpted, nudges the reader toward the conclusion that the marriage ended because Guilfoyle moved right while Newsom held firm.
That's not a confession. That's positioning.
Conservative readers will note the irony of a governor who has presided over California's decline, its population exodus, its fiscal chaos, its homeless encampments, now packaging his personal history as a testament to moral clarity. The man who defied the law on same-sex marriage in 2004 wants credit for courage. The man who couldn't hold a marriage together wants to hold the country together.
Memoirs from ambitious politicians always read the same way. Every failure becomes a lesson. Every weakness becomes evidence of growth. Every convenient anecdote lands exactly where the campaign needs it to land.
Gavin Newsom saw something in those marriages he didn't see in his own. The rest of us can see something in this book he'd rather we didn't: a campaign launch in hardcover.