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14 February 2024

The making of an American conservative

Rob Henderson’s memoir Troubled paints a bleak picture of poverty in the US. Are liberal “luxury beliefs” to blame?

By Pippa Bailey

In January Rob Henderson posted a newsletter to his Substack: “Book Stores Refuse to Host an Event for My Book”. No major bookshop in New York City or San Francisco would host an event for his new memoir, Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class, he explained – perhaps because of his support for Jordan Peterson, or because the content of the book was too polarising. “I am an unwelcome author,” he wrote. For the first 250 pages of Troubled, I struggled to imagine why that would be the case.

Rob Henderson was born in 1990 in Los Angeles to a drug-addicted mother who, he later learned from social worker reports, would “tie me to a chair with a bathrobe belt so that she could get high in another room without being interrupted”. When he was a baby, they lived in her car. Henderson’s earliest memory is of hiding in his mother’s lap from two police officers. After being arrested, she was deported to her birthplace, Seoul, South Korea. Henderson, who never knew his father, entered the Los Angeles County foster system aged three.

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