#031 "Troubled": A review of Rob Henderson's memoir
It's strengths, who it's really for, and why you should give it a read.
In the evenings on the weekend, my parents would turn on Biography, and we would be entertained with the lives of famous celebrities and singers, sometimes great scientists, philosophers, and thinkers, though less frequently. I’d venture a bet that the old stars of Hollywood were more of a draw ratings-wise, especially before the elder generations died out. Before I moved out of the house in 2016, I recall surfing through the channels, to be regaled with a bio of Johnny Depp, still in his late 30s. He hadn’t really done much, and it was mostly a reel of his films, rather than the interesting developments, highs and lows, of the old stars’ lives.
Years back, I used to read Mark Manson’s blog — same guy that wrote “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck”. Often, he had some pithy and interesting bits of advice to serve up, though not everything was my favorite, I gleaned what I found most useful at the time. He had a good bit on dating, and by extension, meeting other people: It is not other people’s job to impress you; it is your job to find something interesting about that other person. If you don’t click, that’s understandable, since not everyone will be a good fit.
Biographies and memoirs are often the same. I remember being fascinated by someone like Ida Lupino, but not of Marilyn Monroe — overdone and glamorized to the point of deification. People are just people — they’re incredibly, terribly human, their lives often tedious and boring, just like yours and mine.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from
’s memoir. He’d alluded to dysfunction and neglect before in numerous posts that he’s written, without ever going into the weeds. An anecdote here and there to help illustrate his point.In most polite conversation, people don’t discuss their trials and tribulations, in much the same manner that it’s poor form to discuss how much money you spent on a steak dinner or going to an upscale establishment: it’s taboo, and most folks who come from decent backgrounds don’t do it, or talk about themselves and their experiences in great detail. It often takes a long period of time for people to really open up. There’s a sense of privacy, the need and desire to protect the true self, especially from the potential for ridicule, reproach, exposure — that people are going to see who you really are, and maybe—they won’t like what they see.
Well, if you write a memoir or biography, allow yourself to be interviewed by someone doing a profile, or an unexpected expose, there’s not only the potential for the dirty laundry to be aired, but to deeply piss people off who aren’t portrayed in the most flattering light possible—sometimes because it’s the truth, and sometimes because you’re lying.
The first big pill to swallow in any one of these retellings, is that the person has not manipulated or lied to us, that they’re not going to abuse our trust. We have to be convinced of the sincerity of the telling—without them condescending or abusing that reader trust in some way.
Henderson’s book clocks in at around three hundred pages. By my own accounting, it’s not a intellectually difficult book to get through, at least in terms of reading comprehension and style. Henderson writes the book in an accessible way. He tells you the aim of his book toward the very end — though he may say it differently in the introduction, his point is this:
A question I wrestled with in the early stages of writing was “Who is this book for?” Whenever I thought about comfortable upper- and upper-middle-class people reading it, quite frankly, it made my stomach turn.
Instead I kept thinking about some kid like me out there who might pick this up and draw inspiration, the same way I did as a kid hanging out in my schools’ libraries.
A.k.a. to help someone like “me” know and understand that one can navigate these life dangers, still survive to adulthood, and thrive.
The entire purpose of this exercise, to lay out all of his cards, is a noble goal, and one, as a fellow adult with an ACE score of about 3, can relate to.
Henderson gives us a brief summary of his experiences and some well-summed statistics that support his positions about foster care, incarceration and education rates, and the state of those kids as they turn out in adult life. It’s followed by a pretty thorough breakdown of his life through the next 12 chapters in stages leading up to his enrollment at Cambridge University as an adult man around age 30. Henderson is the same age as myself (33). He strives to give interesting anecdotes that illustrate his circumstances, his insights at each of those ages, and the kind of person he was at the time. Around chapters nine and ten he begins the process of assessing and analyzing the impact of his childhood on his adult formation, and demonstrates through the book at what points he developed insight and what he learned to propel him forward.
At no point during this book does Henderson condescend, nor is he sheepish, arrogant, pretentious, or proud about what he did or failed to do. As I read, I never got a sense that Henderson was in any way a victim — he’s very matter-of-fact about the story he tells, and more importantly, humble—about himself and his own stupid, dangerous antics. He breaks down the failings and unfairness of a system of shuffling children around that is meant to help but harms in oh-so-many ways.
There were parts of the book I was bored with — but not because Henderson is a poor writer. Because I am callous and indifferent to some of the circumstances that he lived in.
I’ve never met Rob Henderson, and this isn’t a solicited post; I get no kickbacks or anything of the like. We conversed once when I submitted a piece to his newsletter for dissemination after a call for submissions, and he politely corrected me that he went to Yale, not Harvard, a sad factual mistake on my part. You can read this piece here before it goes into the archives on March 8.
To people who have never lived in poor rural areas, this book may be a wake-up call to a life that is as alien to them as the surface of Mars might be. Henderson talks about doing drugs like smoking weed as 9-year-old child, drinking beer and vodka, skipping school throughout his adolescent and high school years, getting into fights and beating the crap out of people. How most of the adults around him had been separated and partnered multiple times with multiple children.
In college, I worked with a girl at the public library. She had a boyfriend who’s mother had been married and divorced at least three times, his father twice, and had such a roster of full, half, and step-siblings, current and former cousins, it absolutely made my head spin trying to keep straight all of his family connections. Henderson’s extended community of abandoned and neglected friends and acquaintances through high school sound like this kid on steroids. Except, this boyfriend of a coworker wasn’t an isolated case. His was fairly common in the small Indiana town that I lived in from 14 to 26.
Poverty, rampant drug use (weed, crystal meth, and alcohol were the common drugs of choice around my town), domestic violence, teen pregnancy. By the time I graduated high school in 2008, there had been at least 10 girls I knew who had gotten pregnant and/or dropped out of school. One had her child placed in custody, the rumor being that she had been busted for weed. I don’t know what happened to her, as I never saw her again after she dropped out in her seventh month.
The book was a gut-punch reality check from the kind of poverty and despair I had desperately wanted to escape myself. While Starke County, Indiana doesn’t have the criminal murder rate that Red Bluff, California does, at the time (perhaps they’ve turned it around) it used to flip-flop with two southern counties for the title of poorest county in the state every few years.
I was numbed to some of it because I’d seen and heard about it for the 12 years I lived in Indiana. I’d had a fair enough share of being treated like I was an outsider by the local population — in particular because I didn’t evidence the right pro-social behaviors not only appropriate to my peers, but relative to the rural culture of that population, had a strong Chicago accent that separated me from the local dialect (and my acquired southern twang occasionally still comes out when I stupidly tipsy); I swore (and still do, like a sailor; a well-placed F-bomb is still useful in the right contexts); I had a college-mindset, developed vocabulary, and a higher reading level than many but not all my peers; and I didn’t look much like the German and Eastern European-descent people around me. I got called big-nosed for the prominent Italian schnoz on my face, and experienced being treated like I was white trash, simply for the zip code I lived in, than I care to admit.
The information and details about his time in foster care were surprising; I hadn’t known many people like that growing up, though I’m sure there were more than I was aware of. No, the listless driving around, dangerous antics, getting into fights, and lack of adult care and supervision were familiar — in some ways, similar to my own adolescence.
Henderson didn’t have the benefit of a father figure, at least one that stayed around very long, but he did have a brief period of stability with his mom and live-in-girlfriend, before their lives were shattered by a firearm accident, medical bills, and one of the mom’s bad financial decisions and gambling habit.
I could deeply relate to the feelings of alienation, rage, and sorrow. The greatest gut punch was an echoed sentiment through the memoir, with a quote taken from the preface:
I’ve heard variations of the phrase “I’m grateful for what I went through because it made me who I am today.” Despite what I’m proud to have accomplished, I strongly disagree with this sentiment. The tradeoff isn’t worth it. Given the choice, I would swap my position in the top 1 percent of educational attainment to have never been in the top 1 percent of childhood instability.
Interpretation: I’d have given anything to have had stable parents.
It was similar to the sentiment I myself had long echoed after I came to the devastating realization that I had grown up emotional and psychologically abused and severely emotionally neglected:
If I could have wished anything to be different from my childhood, it would have been to have had two emotionally stable, mature parents.
To say those pangs of sadness don’t still slap me in the face every so often would be a lie; it hit me, chapter after chapter, to reinforce what I already knew: that to grow up in instability — whether you have no parents, one parent, two parents, or a guardian, it still leaves scars.
I juxtapose J.D. Vance — like him or not — who has a similar backstory to Henderson.
Both had fathers who abandoned them, mother’s who were drug addicts, and tempestuous family lives. Vance had the crucial difference of a relatively stable though potty-mouthed grandmother and grandfather who loved and tried to keep him in line, and by some measure, the extended family of cousins, aunts, and uncles who sustained support.
For all their lack of emotional regulation and self-control, my parents remained together until my father’s death. The pressure to succeed, take full advantage of my talents, and be something drilled in me a desire to push forward—although I floundered terribly for years in darkness to believe one of the most crucial things that all children need to be secure:
That they are loved.
In this way, though we had different backgrounds and upbringings, Henderson and I, along with the many children and adults who’ve survived tumultuous beginnings, struggle to believe this core message:
That we are loved. That we are wanted.
This memoir isn’t for the upper class elites that Henderson skewers for their feel-good moralizing, though I think it’s rightly deserved and I’ll save those one-two-punches for you to discover on your own should you choose to read this book.
This book is a testament to someone who wanted to survive, and struggled to find his way through to how. To figuring out what he was good for, what his purpose was, what he wanted, and ultimately, who he really was as a person shaped by the experiences that he had.
This book is to him what my work as a wounded healer is to me: to help people.
When I made the decision to go to graduate school in 2019, somewhere around the same time that he himself was going for his own PhD, I washed out of two interviews: one for a doctoral program, and one for a masters. But I knew my purpose, though for me, there were many hours sat in a pew at a local Catholic church agonizing before the alter through all the doubt that plagued me if this was the right decision, or if I was full of hubris and pride thinking I could “help” people.
I wanted to help people who were struggling get out of darkness and find their way out of whatever purgatory or hell they were in. I wanted to help out other adults who grew up as abused kids like myself.
There’s some gnarly things in there that made me set the book down, either to pause for a break, or because it dredged up the sorrow and isolation from memories of feeling worthless, unloved, and misunderstood. Thankfully, my husband is as patient as he is kind, and helped me reframe and reprocess my own grief that came up during this reading.
This book is a hopeful letter to all of those with similar or adjacent experiences to his own that yes, someday, we do get out alive. It’s a hard battle. We come out emotionally and spiritually scarred, but that is what makes the outcome all the greater. Though it’s not a fairytale, it’s a hero’s journey worth taking. It reminds me of a quote that I think is worth leaving you with.
Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
To order a copy of Henderson’s book, you can find it in physical bookstores, Amazon, Bookshop.org, or wherever books are sold.
General Housekeeping
My subscription-based serial novel Heart of Stone will be coming out March 11. If you’re interested in a subversive fantasy novel about a secluded group of people living in a cliff trying to solve a murder and get revenge, please consider a paid subscription, as paid subscribers will receive a printed copy of the book once it finishes in June 2025.
In other news, my husband and I are expecting, and we are due at the end of August. I’m working on a plan to have some content prepared for the months that I’m on maternity leave, so you’re not left out in the cold.
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I’m also working on a children’s book for next Christmas. If you are an illustrator or can recommend a good one, please shoot me a note. Paid subscribers can also send an email to thepracticaltherapist@substack.com.
I didn’t get much reading done this week, as yesterday and this past weekend were full of house-hunting and prep work for clients yesterday.
However,
has a new book out. If you haven’t read today’s offering from , check out this moderately scathing review of school counselors and therapists. I have to agree with Shrier, but I’m biased and critical of my own profession.Till next time,
Pax Christi 🕊️
Rachael Varca is a pre-licensed therapist and writer of more than fifteen years experience. She writes at The Practical Therapist and Inking Out Loud, a collection of essays, poems, and home of the serialized novel, Heart of Stone.
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