Review of TROUBLED
Rob Henderson’s memoir and his path to ‘luxury beliefs’
tl;dr – A great reflective memoir focused on how Henderson’s experiences throughout childhood and young adulthood led to his academic concept of ‘luxury beliefs’. Great read for those that enjoy memoirs, and a bonus if you listen on audio as it’s read by the author.
Longtime readers of my newsletter know that I’m a huge fan of memoirs. I love hearing people’s stories and learning how their reflections lead to some insight about the world. Usually, memoirs focus on some obstacle one has overcome, their personal growth, and the culmination of that chapter of their life. Although they follow a relatively predicable format, great stories are still great stories.
In Rob Henderson’s new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, he recounts his childhood experiences of abandonment across numerous foster homes, his risky youth, and eventually his prestigious university education. But what he gained from this experience is his now well-known academic concept of ‘luxury beliefs’.
Henderson grew up in Los Angeles. After being abandoned by his dad, and taken from his mom, Henderson bounced between foster homes for most of his youth. Each time hardening his emotional response to abandonment. Eventually Henderson was adopted by a couple, and he moved up to northern California where he now had a mom, dad, and a sister. But eventually that father left too. After his mom re-partnered, that relationship eventually fell apart as well.
The constant cycle of abandonment, moving, and instability wore on him. In his reflections on in his youth, Henderson speaks of the instability of his childhood as a driving force for risky behavior. In psychology, the impact of childhood instability on later risky behavioral outcomes is explained by ‘life history theory’: children in unstable and unpredictable environments learn to focus on the here and now, make few long-term plans, and see risk differently than kids who grow up in stable and predictable environments.
Despite what one might assume based on his college education now, Henderson is the small statistic of kids who ‘make it’ – those that don’t end up dead, addicted to drugs, or incarcerated. But Henderson’s path to higher education was nontraditional. He served in the Air Force for several years before pursuing college. And once he ended up at Yale, he experienced culture shock given that nearly all the students he interacted with grew up in stable two parent families, and many were rather affluent. This is not atypical of today’s elite universities where the student body tends to be highly homogeneous.
His experience at Yale and subsequently while pursuing his PhD at St Catharine's College ultimately led to his original academic concept of ‘luxury beliefs’ – an idea or opinion that confers status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower class. These luxury beliefs, often signaling progressive opinions of educated white liberals, are the primary way in which academic concepts creep into mainstream in public discourse today, despite solving few actually problems of those the beliefs are intended to help.
Henderson’s memoir is a great read. I highly recommend the audio, as I do for most memoirs if they are read by the author like this one. I’ve been a follower of his work and social media presence for many years, and it was great to hear the story behind the intellect.
Published: February 2024
Publisher: Gallery Books
Format: Audio
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Educated: A Memoir (2018) by Tara Westover
Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race (2019) by Thomas Chatterton Williams
The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars (2019) by Meghan Daum
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