The 2020 candidate plays her cards close to the chest in her new book. But readers can learn a lot from what she doesn’t say

Hollywood stars never tell you what they’re actually allowed to eat, and political memoirs never tell you how a politician actually got elected.

Senator Kamala Harris’s new autobiography, released just before she announced her presidential campaign, reveals very little about the California senator’s fascinating, historic rise in Democratic politics. Campaign memoirs are not a literary exercise: they’re an excuse for a speaking tour. Like most examples of the genre, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey is a mix of copy-pasted policy papers and “relatable” personal anecdotes. Harris repeats, sometimes nearly word for word, many of the stories she has shared in speeches and interviews.

Still, hidden between the recaps of recent crises, there’s a surprisingly clear portrait of a candidate wary of the cost of sharing too much about herself.

She protested from an early age

When Harris decided to become a prosecutor in the Oakland district attorney’s office, she had defend her choice to “incredulous” friends and family. She was raised in Berkeley at the height of the civil rights movement and had been taken to protests in her stroller. (Once, when she was upset as a toddler, her mother asked her what she wanted. “Fweedom!” tiny Kamala yelled back.)

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Harris writes that she has often faced questions about “how I, as a black woman, could countenance being part of ‘the machine’ putting more young men of color behind bars”.

“I knew part of making change was what I’d seen all my life, surrounded by adults shouting and marching and demanding justice from the outside,” Harris writes. “But I also knew there was an important role on the inside, sitting at the table where decisions were being made. When activists came marching and banging on the doors, I wanted to be on the other side to let them in.”

Her most vivid descriptions are of buildings

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harris writes in detail about government buildings and bureaucratic troubles. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

The “regal” superior courthouse in Oakland, which looks like “an art deco wedding cake”. “The “gray, solemn and imposing” Hall of Justice in San Francisco. The “magnificence” of the supreme court in Washington. Harris is at her most effusive when she describes government buildings, particularly court houses. “These are buildings that speak,” she writes, explaining her habit of visiting high court buildings whenever she tours foreign countries.

Harris writes about bureaucratic dysfunction. One of the offices where she worked as a young lawyer had a culture of backstabbing so intense that attorneys were afraid to attend goodbye parties for their fired colleagues. Later, Harris was elected to run that office, and she recounts proudly how she worked to change the office culture, starting with repainting and installing photocopiers that actually worked. “I’ve always believed there is no problem too small to fix,” she writes.

She turns to Doritos at times of crisis

There are real personal details in the first, carefully sketched chapter about Harris’ childhood in Berkeley: her neighbors and caretakers, her mother’s cooking, her trips to visit her mother’s family in India and her father’s family in Jamaica. (Sorry, Canadians: Montreal, where she and her mother and sister moved when she was 12, gets a scant six paragraphs.)

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But the few personal details of Harris’ adult life feel forced. The book opens, with artificial intimacy, with Harris waking up in bed. Her love of Doritos, already mobilized as an acceptable quirk, makes another appearance.

As she watched the 2016 election returns and realized Trump was going to win, Harris, who had just been elected to the Senate, ate an entire “family-size” bag of Doritos by herself. “Didn’t share a single chip,” she writes.

What’s most fascinating is what she leaves out

Harris dated the former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown for a year, when he was 60 and she was 29. Harris is only one of Brown’s political proteges, who include California’s governor and San Francisco’s mayor, who once babysat Brown’s children. Her memoir does not mention Brown’s name.

More surprising is how little Harris shares about her adult relationship with her younger sister, Maya Harris, a former top adviser to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and now the chair of Harris’ 2020 campaign. Maya, a veteran of influential progressive groups, and her husband, Tony West, the third-ranking official in Obama’s justice department, are often mentioned, but never quite in focus, as if each time the camera turns toward them, they move to the edge of the frame.

The work of a political memoir, see-sawing between impressive achievements and “but I’m just like you” details, seems to leave no space for the story of how two brilliant sisters, the daughters of immigrants from India and Jamaica, made their family into a Democratic political force. It would be interesting, for example, to hear how the family handled the moment when both Harris and her brother-in-law were presumed to be on the list of potential replacements for Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general, in 2014.

It’s not just about winning – she loves the fight

Harris writes with zeal when she describes settlement negotiations with bank executives over the role the institutions played in the foreclosure crisis.

Harris, then attorney general of California, explains how the negotiations unfolded and what it took for her to be able to pull California out of them altogether. Instead of broadly describing needy Americans, she gives sharp portraits of her opponents and the one-liners she landed at conference tables. (Her staff, she writes later, joke that “Kamala” means “get more commas in that settlement price”.)

Harris will continue to face scrutiny over whether she was tough enough on bank executives, including Steve Mnunchin, now Trump’s treasury secretary. But her description of the foreclosure fight offers a hint of a broader critique, perhaps to come, of just how unprepared bank executives were to face any kind of real accountability from the government.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harris in Los Angeles, 2010. Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP

She is oddly bad at describing the people she has helped

“You represent the people,” Harris tells young lawyers. “So I expect you to know exactly who the people are.”

But in the stories Harris tells about her career, the people she has helped are often faceless and nameless. She describes her feelings on the first day she went to trial on her own, but says nothing about her client. Her fight to make sure that a young mother swept up in a drug raid did not have to spend the weekend in jail was “a defining moment in my life”, Harris writes, but she notes that she never actually met the mother.

Harris writes with warmth about friends and allies, and seems proud to be part of a cohort of women who helped each other rise. She is not above a few well-placed jabs at the men who underestimated her. (“I hope you know how big a job this is going to be,” she describes her Republican opponent telling her, as he concedes the race for California attorney general.)

But in writing about the Americans who need politicians’ help, Harris often slips into vague cliches: grieving mothers, anxious fathers.

Her husband would be played by Bradley Cooper in a film

Harris married Doug Emhoff, an entertainment lawyer from Los Angeles, in 2014. His Twitter feed portrays him as his wife’s biggest fan and a proud father. (He has two children from a previous marriage.)

Douglas Emhoff (@douglasemhoff) That moment when you walk by the tv in your office lobby and see your wife speaking to ⁦@jaketapper⁩ on that tv... pic.twitter.com/rglvdvAksY

The glimpses Harris gives us of her husband are sweet and goofy: wearing goggles to chop onions in the kitchen (“Let me tell you, there’s nothing more attractive than a man in onion goggles”), or being so excited to propose to her that he can’t wait until their romantic trip to Italy. Instead, he takes out the ring as she’s distracted and trying to pack the night before their flight. In an early joint media interview, after Harris dodges a question about who would play her in a movie, Emhoff says he’d be “delighted” to be played by Bradley Cooper.

When they first started dating, Harris was the attorney general of California, and Emhoff appeared to take her busy schedule very seriously.

“The morning after our first date, Doug emailed me with all of his available dates for the next couple of months. ‘I’m too old to play games or hide the ball,’ the email read. ‘I really like you, and I want to see if we can make this work.’”

