Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class

by Rob Henderson

Gallery Books

335 pp., $28.99

It is fitting that Vice President-Elect J. D. Vance, having overcome a difficult upbringing himself, helped Rob Henderson with his drafts of Troubled, a memoir about Henderson’s improbable path from a troubled childhood in California to recently completing a Ph.D. in psychology at Cambridge. Vance’s own 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, made him a household name and began a sequence of events that resulted in his becoming a United States senator in 2023 and now second-in-line to the nation’s highest office.

Both Hillbilly Elegy and Troubled tell stories of young men who grew up amid hardships and poverty, joined the military, and then entered Yale University, a place both, in their own ways, found foreign and, at times, bewildering. Though Henderson later attended Cambridge, Troubled especially focuses on the pathologies associated with Yale’s student body.

Much has been said by other reviewers and commentators about the political implications of Troubled, as well as Henderson’s belief (backed by considerable research) that social spending programs are no substitute for a stable, two-parent upbringing. Yet Troubled—more than anything else—succeeds as an engagingly written story. It also provides insights about the foster care system in the United States; what causes certain children to experiment with drugs; the struggles of Americans who have the odds stacked against them from an early age; as well as what tends to perpetuate rather than reverse poverty. I rarely strayed far from my copy of Troubled from the moment I cracked the cover, and I felt compelled to finish reading it within 24 hours. 

Henderson was born in Los Angeles to a mother addicted to drugs; he never knew his biological father. He entered the foster system at age three and then was shuffled through numerous homes until being adopted five years later by a family in Red Bluff, California. Henderson could not believe his luck to finally have a family of his own. On his first Christmas morning after being adopted, he could scarcely believe his ears when he was told that the heaping pile of gifts beneath the Christmas tree was his. 

Sadly, his luck did not last. Henderson’s adoptive parents soon separated when his adoptive mother admitted that she had always been attracted to women. This led to bitter divorce proceedings, and Henderson became permanently estranged from his adoptive father due to the acrimony of the custody battle.

From there, Henderson went on a downward spiral. He started smoking marijuana at age nine, performed terribly in school, and spent his adolescence drinking, behaving recklessly, and engaging in endless acts of mischief, which included getting in a fistfight while drunk driving and witnessing a friend kick a dog to its death off an embankment.

Approaching something resembling rock bottom, Henderson decided to join the United States Air Force, thus beginning a journey that would later bring him to Yale and then Cambridge, though he was still struggling with alcohol addiction during his military service. 

In recent years, Henderson has built a sizable online audience, sharing insights from psychology, evolutionary biology, literature, and politics. Although reviewers of Troubled in the mainstream press routinely label Henderson as conservative, until recently, he has largely steered clear of commenting on electoral politics.

One of the most affecting points raised in Troubled is that Henderson’s life trajectory since leaving high school is very much the exception rather than the rule for children who grow up amid the instability he experienced. That is brought into sharp relief in a section near the end of the book, where Henderson rattles off what occupies his various childhood friends now. He writes:

My friend Cristian has been released from prison and, as of three years ago, was unemployed. Tyler cleans carpets for a living. Two years ago, he posted an Instagram photo of himself with a facial disfigurement because he had wrecked his motorcycle again… Antonio has one kid out of wedlock and another with a different woman on the way. John joined the military at age twenty-four, served for six years and is now working at a restaurant and taking community college classes. Tom lives with his girlfriend and was recently fired from Walmart.

Other parts of the book are memorable for the emotional pain they reveal, such as when Henderson describes his estrangement and later reconnection with his mother’s girlfriend, Shelly, who had stayed out of touch because of how hurt she had been by her breakup with Henderson’s adoptive mother. It was touching to read about his adoptive mother’s pride when she learned her son was headed to Yale. 

Henderson discusses his concept of “luxury beliefs,” an idea at least partially found in the works of other writers but popularized by Henderson in many of his writings, most notably in a 2019 New York Post op-ed. Informed by his experiences at Yale, Henderson considers a luxury belief a viewpoint that social elites hold but do not follow, such as the idea that “marriage is an outdated institution.” They profess, but do not practice, these ideas both to signal virtue and to convey in-group membership. Unfortunately, people in the lower-classes, such as the ones Henderson grew up with in Red Bluff, sometimes take these statements by their social superiors to heart and actually live them out. Having children outside of marriage is one such consequence.

William F. Buckley, quoting Clare Boothe Luce, once wrote that “all public figures come to be associated with a single achievement, never mind how complex their career.” Henderson seems to have become associated with the concept of luxury beliefs in this fashion. This is unfortunate, I think, both because the concept has limited explanatory value and because Henderson should be known for other ideas as well. 

In his newsletter, X posts, and columns, Henderson comments perceptively on human nature—often, interestingly enough, bringing back to light older books and articles that he finds worthwhile but have arguably slipped from our current purview. Henderson himself has said that he prefers to read books and articles that are more than five years old, allowing time for the truly insightful to remain once the news cycle of the fashionable has passed. Many of his insights are actionable and contain elements of self-help advice. 

Crucially, much of the advice Henderson offers includes things most people already know but perhaps have forgotten. It was C. S. Lewis who wrote, “Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, ‘People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.’” Henderson understands this. What one grows to appreciate about Henderson’s work is that he emphasizes the basics: building good habits by doing a little each day; avoiding drinking to excess; exercising; cultivating friendships; and sticking to traditional family formation rather than new-age, experimental ideas about relationships. 

As Joseph Epstein once wrote of his friend Midge Decter, “Her specialty is in saying the important obvious things when everyone else seems to have forgotten it.” Unfortunately, so many of the young men in Red Bluff increasingly left behind lost sight of these fundamentals. 

Yale changed considerably between 2016, when Hillbilly Elegy was published, and 2024, when Troubled was released. I attended Yale, an institution now beyond either satire or salvation, and graduated just a year apart from Henderson. One mistake Henderson arguably makes is seeming to conflate all so-called rich people with the type of rich people who often attend Yale. There are plenty of young people from a similar economic background, such as the guys I went to high school with, who have next to nothing in common ideologically or temperamentally with the typical Yale student. My high school classmates tended to be flag-waving, God-fearing young men, some of whom joined the military like Henderson, even with every reason in the world not to. Wealth is not always corrupting. 

The author William Deresiewicz infamously referred to so many Yale students as “excellent sheep,” characterizing them as an anxious lot terrified of stepping out of line and thinking for themselves. As I think about the handful of Yale graduates with whom I keep in touch, all of them came from working class backgrounds either in the South or Midwest. 

Whether it is Jordan Peterson and his refusal to use preferred gender pronouns, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson and his off-the-cuff, impassioned speech in favor of gun rights that went viral (and his later fall from grace amid an alleged pornography scandal), or Henderson and Vance’s stories of childhood hardship, so much intellectual and political celebrity today seems to have its genesis in details of biography rather than underlying work. 

Notwithstanding, one hopes that while people come for the personal stories, they will stay for the ideas. This has certainly been true for Peterson, a thinker with whom Henderson has engaged in dialogue on the former’s podcast. In Henderson’s case, his relevance extends beyond his personal struggles; he offers ample insights for those readers who, impressed with how he overcame such hardship in early life, decide to take a closer look at his ideas.