Pete Buttigieg has been the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, since 2012. He went to Harvard, spent two years as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, where he studied Immanuel Kant and John Rawls, and served as a Navy lieutenant in Afghanistan. He speaks Arabic. He plays concert piano. He is gay. And now, at the age of 37, he has written a memoir, “Shortest Way Home.”
On the face of it, this does seem a little early. Yes, Barack Obama wrote one in 1995, nine years before he made a name for himself with a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. But Obama was an unusual figure, a graceful writer with an arresting story of being an African-American with national political ambitions growing up in the turbulence of a race-torn nation.
The emergence of this memoir at this moment — Buttigieg (pronounced BOOT-edge-edge) has been elected to precisely one job so far — reflects the ambition and impatience of the man we get to know in these pages. He ran for Indiana state treasurer when he was 28, and was trounced. He withdrew after a heading-for-defeat bid to become the Democratic National Committee chairman in 2017. But more than that, Buttigieg’s accelerated career arc is testimony to our times, to how the pay-your-dues traditions that once governed politics have been tossed aside with the election of Donald Trump. It seems no longer surprising that someone most people have never heard of has delivered a memoir: It has become the modern equivalent of an early outing to New Hampshire.
With his rich résumé and his data-driven approach to running South Bend, Buttigieg has drawn attention from national Democrats and been suggested as potential presidential material by, among others, Frank Bruni in The New York Times. Just in case there was any doubt, Buttigieg announced this week that he was forming an exploratory committee, the first step toward a run for the White House. And no wonder: His hometown, once devastated by the shuttering of a Studebaker plant — he writes of passing “the acres of collapsing Studebaker factories” on his way to school — is now thriving. If the underlying point of this book is to draw attention to himself as a future Democratic leader for a party aching for one, then his thumping re-election as mayor in a state Trump captured with 56 percent is quite a selling card.
No small part of the fascination is that he is openly gay, twice elected in what he has sardonically described as “flyover country.” Yet until the final chapters — personal, beguiling and quite moving as he talks about coming out and getting married — it is a subject he largely glosses over. It takes more than 40 pages until he clearly alludes to being gay, in a quick detour as he describes witnessing the rise of the infant Facebook at Harvard.
Buttigieg takes us through growing up in South Bend, attending an Ivy League school, becoming a management consultant, joining the Navy Reserve. Much of his attention is on City Hall, with a green-eyeshade description of his methodical approach to dealing with 1,000 shuttered homes or increasing the efficiency of picking up the trash. There really is a chapter titled “Talent, Purpose and the Smartest Sewers in the World.” But this is what mayors do.
Until he recounts writing his coming-out essay for The South Bend Tribune, I had begun to wonder if Buttigieg had decided to airbrush his life story, with an eye to some future opposition researcher combing through these pages. This lends a cautious, sanitized feeling to some episodes. When he writes about dealing with Mike Pence (who was then the governor) as Pence championed a “religious freedom” bill that critics argued would let organizations discriminate against gays and lesbians, Buttigieg comes across as just another player at the table. I would have liked to learn, for example, if he ever wondered whether Pence was aware that this unmarried eligible bachelor was actually gay.
But the book lifts off as he returns from Afghanistan and decides it was “time to get serious about sorting out my personal life.” He recounts in satisfying detail the complexities of coming out when you are the mayor of South Bend. “The scenario of a 30-something mayor, single, gay, interested in a long-term relationship and looking for a date in Indiana must have been a first,” he writes. The story of his meeting a man (you guessed it: online) is all the more moving for its understatement and delayed delivery. Buttigieg represents a new generation of gay Americans, one whose sexuality is not intrinsic to their identity.
No one would ever accuse Buttigieg of being an evocative writer, but the story is told with brisk engagement — it is difficult not to like him — without sinking into the kind of prose one might fear from someone trained in writing reports for McKinsey. He writes with particular clarity when it comes to the subject of romance:
“I was in my 30s, but my training age, so to speak, was practically 0. On my 33rd birthday, I was starting my fourth year as the mayor of a sizable city. I had served in a foreign war and dined with senators and governors. I had seen the Red Square and the Great Pyramids of Giza, knew how to order a sandwich in seven languages, and was the owner of a large historic home on the St. Joseph River. But I had absolutely no idea what it was like to be in love.”
When Obama wrote his memoir, the idea that the nation would soon put an African-American in the White House seemed beyond the realm of the possible. After reading this memoir written 25 years later, the notion that Buttigieg might be the nation’s first openly gay president doesn’t feel quite as far-fetched.
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“Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future,” By Pete Buttigieg, 352 pages. Liveright Publishing. $27.95.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.