Gavin Newsom says the moment he realized his marriage to Kimberly Guilfoyle was finished came while he was busy defying state and federal law. The California governor's new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery, recounts what he calls "early warning signs" his marriage was "doomed," and pins the revelation to his 2004 decision as San Francisco's mayor to allow same-sex couples to marry in the city.
"I saw something in those marriages that I did not see in my own," Newsom writes.
That's the thesis. The man who broke the law to redefine marriage for others couldn't keep his own together. The book, widely viewed as a precursor for a 2028 presidential bid, is part confession, part campaign brochure, and it tells you everything about what Newsom thinks Democratic primary voters want to hear.
According to the couple, they married in December 2001 at St. Ignatius Church, with the reception at the Getty mansion. Newsom's father, William, was a close friend and the administrator of the Getty family's trust. The optics were built in.
But according to Newsom's telling, the cracks appeared almost immediately. Three days after he was sworn in as mayor, Guilfoyle flew to New York to start a new job as a host for Court TV. Two ambitious people, two cities, one marriage on autopilot. Newsom attributes "much of the demise" of the relationship to "phoning it in while on independent, ambitious career tracks."
His sister Hilary, quoted in the book, was less diplomatic about Guilfoyle:
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 offered a sharper observation about the dynamic between the two:
I saw a lot of adoration from her to you, Gavin. But less from you to her.
Newsom doesn't dispute this. He writes that he "gave only a little of myself to Kimberly," adding that instead of regretting it, he "kept wishing I could have given a lot more to my dying mother." His mother Tessa, then just 55, decided to end her life in 2002 via doctor-assisted suicide after battling aggressive metastatic breast cancer. It was during this period that the marriage deteriorated beyond repair.
Here is where the story turns from personal to political, and where Newsom's ambitions become impossible to miss.
In 2004, early in his tenure as mayor, Newsom defied both state and federal law to allow same-sex marriages in San Francisco. The period became known as the "winter of love," with couples including Rosie O'Donnell and Kelli Carpenter among those who married. Newsom frames this act of lawbreaking as the moment of moral clarity in which he saw what was missing from his own union.
A convenient epiphany. According to the Daily Mail, Newsom doesn't describe it as a legal violation with political consequences. He describes it as a spiritual experience that illuminated the hollowness of his own vows. For a man positioning himself for a presidential run, the packaging is immaculate: I broke the rules because love demanded it, and in doing so, I discovered the truth about my own life.
Whether you find that moving or calculated depends entirely on how you feel about politicians who turn every life event into a narrative arc that happens to align with the Democratic platform.
What stands out in Newsom's account is how many people around him apparently knew the marriage was failing before he did, or at least before he admits he did.
His mother scolded Guilfoyle about things she'd seen in the marriage. Guilfoyle left in tears. Newsom writes that his "mother was of the mind that the marriage between Kimberly and me would not last, but she chose to hide those feelings from me." When she finally confronted Guilfoyle directly, Newsom's reaction was telling: "Mom had finally found a voice, it seemed."
His sister Hilary had "reservations" about the coupling. She pointed out that Guilfoyle's "need for attention and love could not be met." Newsom himself acknowledges he "was worried that I had brought a kind of passivity into the relationship, a 'go along to get along,' that was itself a devil's bargain."
After about four years of marriage and the embarrassing 2004 Harper's Bazaar photo shoot that labeled them the "new Kennedys," they announced their divorce in January 2005. Newsom writes that the fairy tale "was not to be," and that "the distance between Kimberly and me became a breach, and the breach widened into a chasm that could not be repaired."
He also concedes a "bout of bachelorhood" that he "did not handle with discernment." One of the more honest lines in the book, and he doesn't elaborate.
Newsom married Jennifer Siebel Newsom, an actress and documentary film director, in 2008. They have four children together.
Guilfoyle's career path took her to Fox News, and her personal life moved in a direction Newsom describes with barely concealed disbelief. He writes that she "was on a career path that 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." She dated Donald Trump Jr. from 2018 to 2024, and the two were eventually engaged. President Donald Trump named Guilfoyle ambassador to Greece 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.
Guilfoyle landed an ambassadorship. Newsom is writing memoirs and eyeing the White House. Both moved on. Both moved up. The difference is that only one of them felt the need to revisit the wreckage in hardcover.
Strip away the personal drama and what remains is a campaign book dressed in memoir's clothing. Every revelation is carefully chosen to serve the version of Gavin Newsom that a Democratic primary electorate might want: the man who was brave enough to defy unjust laws, sensitive enough to mourn a dying mother, and honest enough to admit his own failings in love.
The personal pain is real. A mother's death at 55. A marriage that couldn't survive ambition and distance. Those things deserve gravity, and Newsom, to his credit, doesn't entirely reduce them to political props.
But he does put them in a book timed for a presidential run. He does frame his lawbreaking as a moral awakening. He does contrast his ex-wife's rightward trajectory with his own path as though it's self-evidently a story of divergence from virtue.
Newsom wants you to read this as a love story about a man who found himself. Conservatives will read it as a familiar story about a politician who found a narrative.
