Troubled is a memoir of a harrowing childhood. Separated from his drug-addicted biological mother, Rob Henderson was passed through seven foster homes before finally being adopted by a couple who soon divorced. Despite fears of academic talent, Henderson became disengaged during his adolescence, earning terrible grades and spending most of his free time drinking, smoking, and committing petty crime. A stint in the Air Force helped Henderson escape his self-destructive path, and, despite difficulties, he managed to get accepted into Yale and then Cambridge.
Henderson spends much of the final part of his memoir articulating the theory of “extravagant beliefs” – the idea that upper-class people use certain views on lifestyle to signal their elite status, even if they live in a way that runs counter to their stated values. He argues that judgments like “it’s okay to be a single parent,” “drugs should be legalized,” and “you can be healthy at any weight” come from elites who are mostly married, sober, and thin. He comes to see such attitudes not just as hypocritical, but as actively destructive to working- and lower-class Americans for whom absent fathers, drug addiction, and obesity are deep-rooted ills.
Henderson’s theory of luxury beliefs has some value in examining how people express their membership in an educated elite. It is less persuasive when it argues that many working-class people take this elite rhetoric seriously, or that the chaos and dysfunction in many working-class communities could be ameliorated if only the most educated people in society told a different story.
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