TROUBLED

A memoir of hardscrabble living, from foster care to the Air Force to Yale, that doubles as the education narrative of a young conservative.

Henderson, who has a doctorate in psychology, traces the contours of his remarkable and often-harrowing life, starting with his abandonment by his birth parents after serious mistreatment. The author quotes a social work report stating that his mother would “tie me to a chair with a bathrobe belt so that she could get high in another room without being interrupted.” Henderson poignantly describes his rocky journey through numerous foster homes. Sadly, his ultimate placement with a family in Red Bluff, California, didn’t turn out to be a classic happy ending: When the parents separated, the family’s father abandoned him, too. Henderson’s teenage years were a haze of alcohol, marijuana, the “choking game,” economic insecurity, and the brutality of life among other young people living on the margins. Enlistment in the Air Force provided structure, and the author’s relationship with his adopted sister and mother are bright spots in this often-bleak book. During his studies at Yale, the author was drawn into the anti-woke wars. He covers campus mores and faculty drama in minute detail, and sometimes the narrative drifts into shallow generalizations about college-aged liberals. Henderson, who returns repeatedly to his idea of “luxury beliefs,” which separate the upper class from the rest, is often shrewd on the narrowness and hypocrisy of elites, but he’s at his best in the frank observations about his trip up the “American status ladder”—including the flavored “spa water” offered in Yale dining halls and the litany of endpoints for his high school friends, from prison and unemployment to carpet cleaning and beyond.

A blunt story about overcoming adversity that sometimes reads like the introduction to a future political campaign.