Troubled (Rob Henderson)

Henderson’s memoir of a childhood in the Los Angeles foster system and then a poor, chaotic household in rural Red Bluff, California — followed by the Air Force, Yale on the GI Bill, and a Cambridge PhD in psychology. The two halves are the argument: having lived on both sides, he contends that the stable family structures his elite classmates quietly relied on were precisely the ones they publicly disparaged. This is the book in which his term luxury beliefs — positions that cost the affluent nothing to hold and the poor a great deal to live under — gets its full statement.

Why it’s on the list: The source text for the luxury-beliefs argument, told as a memoir rather than as social science, by someone who crossed the class line in one lifetime.

Where I saw it: Michael Mauboussin’s favourite books of 2024, posted December 31, 2024.

Connections

• Rob Henderson — the author.
• Luxury Beliefs — the concept this book coined and argues for at length.
• Poverty · Meritocracy — the two structures the memoir passes through, in that order.
• Michael Mauboussin — the curator whose 2024 list this came from.