Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class
And A Short Note on Edith Piaf
I recently wrote here on Substack that if the author of Troubled, Rob Henderson, didn’t exist at this moment we would have had to invent him. What I meant is that Rob speaks directly into the storm of modern life with an honesty and authenticity that, for my money, are unmatched. There have been other writers who approach his idea of luxury beliefs, but not in the first person, not as a human being who experienced the world firsthand as a foster kid and later as a Yale undergrad.
The full title is Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class. There are three parts to the book. Part one comprises Rob’s memoir of his early life as a foster child and then his adoption and subsequent family problems, divorce and general instability through high school. Part two is Rob’s attempt to climb above his personal history, his slow descent into alcohol abuse and his confrontation with his past. In the final part Rob enters Yale and eventually Cambridge to study and he receives both an formal and an informal education.
The story Henderson relates about life as a foster kid, his painful memory of being taken from his drug addicted mother, through countless other abuses large and small, is a slap in the face, a wake up call to a society that seems to have forgotten the lives of children. When the story moves forward and Henderson finds himself over and over again with kids who like himself come from broken homes and who exhibit lightly concealed rage in their bad behavior, the reader senses that there’s a logic to how broken lives unfold. We who remember the Murphy Brown episode learned not to judge, learned to be quiet in the face of all the bad ideas that have left our society torn and vulnerable. That was a mistake; that’s the slap in the face.
Henderson manages to graduate high school, and he does a long stint in the US Air Force, travels a good bit and falls into alcohol abuse, but finds help and gets his feet back underneath him. So he studies psychology at Yale and earns a PhD in same from Cambridge, all the while trying to make sense of the two worlds that his life dropped him into.
It is the informal education Henderson receives from the mouths of his fellow students that really raises the reader’s eyebrows. It’s hard to believe that the upper class, (the vast majority of students at America’s finest universities are both upper class and elite in the sense they they come from well off homes where the parents are themselves graduates of elite schools), has strayed this far from the center of American life. It’s almost as if, and I don’t write this to be a smart aleck and score points, the graduates of elite schools in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, married other graduates and produced a super elite group of inbred morons. I don’t understand how elites, who come from stable, loving, two parent homes, which is the vast majority of them, believe as a group that marriage is not important, optional, but they do. You might read this and think ‘that’s silly’, but when Rob Henderson heard that from his cohort at Yale he was flabbergasted, as someone from his background likely would be.
Troubled is a fascinating book, and the author has done a very good job of letting the story tell itself and bring the reader along. There isn’t a lot of the off hand, self indulgent analysis so common these days, thankfully. But honesty, you’ll get honesty in heaps.
In the end, as a person of integrity, you have to ask yourself if many of the ideas that have sifted through our society have caused us some really bad turns in the last 60 years? Henderson will teach you a simple way of finding the truth: Is this what you want for yourself and your children? Well, is it?
After reading Henderson’s book I had a gnawing thought that there was something I wanted to hear, a song from the past that I’d heard before and enjoyed. I couldn’t put my finger on it right away but the thought kept popping up, “go listen to this again.”
Finally after bugging me for a couple of days, it finally broke through. It was Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je ne regrette rien” that I had to listen to. It translates as “No, I regret nothing.” It’s a defiant song, sung defiantly by Piaf. But now after Henderson’s book I had to listen again. The song is simple really, to paraphrase: I regret nothing, the good, the bad, it’s all the same to me and I just sweep away the past, it means nothing to me now, for my life and my joy starts today with you.
Listening again I sense the song truly was heartfelt for Piaf, it became her anthem. But was it honest? Was Piaf ever able to sweep away her past where she was abandoned by her mother and raised in a brothel? Her long list of short lived love affairs, her drug and alcohol abuse probably tell us the truth. But Piaf herself may have answered the question with her other great hit “La Vie en Rose,” translated as “life colored rosy.”
There is also a film titled of course “La Vie en Rose” that documents Piaf’s struggles; it’s available on Youtube. While she enjoyed commercial success her personal life was difficult, to say the least, and always defiant. If you want to listen to just the song, click below.
Circling back to Troubled, the concept of “luxury beliefs” that Henderson forms during his college education, beliefs that raise the status of the holder with little cost but which extract a high cost from others, is an idea that has finally found a footing, hopefully, in our culture and not a moment too soon. The idea, for example, that marriage is not vitally important to a child’s life is an outrage, yet the class that is most likely to be married and raising their children in a two parent family is the group most likely to believe that marriage is optional. Alas, this idea has sifted through society and it has destroyed lives.
Henderson goes after many luxury beliefs like this and also some of the policies engendered by these beliefs. For example, we have many policies to improve education results, but the best way would be to secure children in a stable, loving home. Without that, education, health and overall life happiness will be impossible to achieve.
For happiness, it’s better to be poor and loved than rich and unloved. Of course the worst is to be poor and unloved. A similar pattern has been found for health - childhood instability, but not poverty, is linked to poor physical and mental well-being in adolescence. In short, to grow up to become a healthy and happy adult, having a loving family as a kid is at least as important as having money.
Childhood trauma isn’t bad because it leads to lower graduation rates or lower incomes. It isn’t bad because it leads to higher rates of addiction and crime. It’s bad because of the first hand, phenomenological experiences of the kids going through it. It’s bad because it’s bad. Frankly, even if stable and secure homes for children had no effect on future educational attainment, occupational success, crime rates, addiction and so on, they are still worth promoting. A safe and loving childhood is a good in itself.
A heartfelt thank you to Rob Henderson. It’s not an easy book to read, but if it’s any consolation dear reader, it must have been ten times more difficult to write.
Another book to the list. Wonderful bound with Piaf, a great fighter.