Rob Henderson’s new memoir, Troubled, describes his journey from foster care in rural California to military service in the U.S. Air Force to public intellectual. With degrees from Yale and Cambridge University, he writes a weekly newsletter on psychology that reaches more than 43,000 subscribers. In this sense, his story is similar to the one told by Ben Carson in Gifted Hands (1990), a poignant account of hardship and success that also includes incisive social commentary.
But reading Henderson’s story, I kept thinking of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920). The hero, Amory Blaine, hails from the Midwest, then attends Princeton, serves in the U.S. Army in the Great War, and, once the war has finished, takes an advertising job in New York. Like Henderson, Blaine emerges from obscurity, attends an Ivy League university, serves in the military, and finds his place among the American smart set.
Yet the most revealing similarity between Henderson and Blaine is that both, in the final moments of their stories, argue for revolution. In Blaine’s case, he quits his advertising job and, after a failed love affair, goes on a three-week bout of drinking that culminates in a long conversation in which he declares himself “spiritually unmarried” and accepts the label of a “natural radical.”
Henderson, now in his mid-thirties, is less direct. At Yale, one of his fellow students told him that “monogamy is kind of outdated” and that “marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone.”