When I was still in single digits, I read The Murder of Robbie Wayne, Age Six. It appeared in condensed form, in Reader’s Digest, on the magazine racks in my primary school library. I probably shouldn’t have read it, realistically, but I’d become—unexpectedly—an advanced reader. My parents often wrote letters requesting permission for me to read certain books: one, I recall, was Lord of the Flies. I was 11.

　　The Murder of Robbie Wayne tells, in unsparing prose, a true story of child abuse that culminated in murder, a trial, and lifelong incarceration. Journalism used to be different, even academic journalism, which meant its author, Mary Jane Chambers, won Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism’s 1981 National Magazine Award for Public Service. It’s difficult to imagine the same award being made today.

　　“This real-life story,” the citation reads, “dramatically brought to millions of readers the too-often hidden problem of child abuse. The magazine rendered a public service of the highest order in its presentation of this shocking crime and in providing information that could help to prevent future Robbie Wayne tragedies.”

　　Robbie Wayne’s story hit me like lightning has been known to strike golfers who insist on marching down the fairway in the middle of electrical storms. It hit me because, before I read it, I’d not known such families existed.

　　I say this because, reading Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class for purposes of commentary and review, it would appear Rob Henderson and I share but a single childhood memory. Both of us were members of Scholastic’s Book Club. It was Scholastic who provided book catalogues from which Henderson tells of his adopted parents encouraging him to order.

　　His account is a charming one, descriptive of a period in his life where he enjoyed relative stability in a solid, lower-middle-class adoptive family. Like everything else, before he reached adulthood, however, that family shattered in ways by turn terrifying and baroque. “If it was raining bloody fur coats,” (paraphrasing my mother here), “Rob Henderson would get hit by the only flying shithouse in the United States.”

　　Was there another child like Rob in my primary school, a kid from a broken family who was nonetheless an avid reader, waving his or her hand in the air to claim a Scholastic book from the teacher’s pile? Troubled is a reminder, perhaps, of how little we know about other children’s inner lives when we ourselves are children.

　　And even if we ask them, they may not tell us. Henderson rebuffed assistance from psychologists, social workers, and teachers because after five years bouncing between seven families in foster care, he simply didn’t trust adults not to be terminally unreliable. His decision looks reasonable because, well, the adults around him really were terminally unreliable. At one point I recalled the old RSPCA slogan and scribbled an adapted form of it in the margin of the review copy: a child is for life, not just for Christmas. There may have been other Robs at my primary school, but by the time I went off to a fee-paying, selective high school, the likelihood of meeting one evaporated. I had a single friend with divorced parents in my teenage “crowd.

　　Go back two decades, and the promise of books like Troubled was that they would allow readers to travel vicariously within someone else’s dreadful childhood. Starting in 1995 with Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, stories of childhoods gone awry grew to become a large part of literature’s post 9/11 hangover, as though we had to be reminded there were other forms of suffering.

　　The genre acquired a mocking name, misery memoir, and not a few publishing executives expressed disquiet at how much money their houses were making out of people’s childhood misfortunes. I’m old enough to remember when bookshops had dedicated sections with shelves groaning under the weight of unhappy existence. Waterstones called it Painful Lives and WH Smith Tragic Life Stories.

　　Past participles drove home the bad thing that happened. Disgraced, Abandoned, Forgotten, Broken, Deceived, Shattered, Sold, Cut. Or the purported actual plea of the child amid abuse tugged our heartstrings: Please, Daddy, No being the highwater mark here, the tortured infant punctuating correctly in extremis.

　　Daddy, I regret to say, appeared often, in ominous terms: When Daddy Comes Home, Daddy’s Little Girl, Dance For Your Daddy, Daddy’s Rules, What Daddy Did. Even if he’s not actually named, he’s nearly always implicated, a cracker here being Ma, He Sold Me for a Few Cigarettes.

　　This is an old impulse. Taking vicarious pleasure or instruction from someone else’s misfortune is what sits behind everything from gladiatorial shows to Jerry Springer. Misery loves company, the old saw has it. Arguably, the emergence of misery memoirs is better than historic manifestations of the compulsion. A friend the same age as me—and who attended a posh high school in Manchester—was once taken on a school excursion to Moss Side, to look at some poor freaks in their native habitat.

　　Given the genre’s history, Henderson must do two difficult things in Troubled. First, shuck off misery memoir’s grim hangover, and secondly, set out and buttress empirical claims while retaining the reader’s interest. He achieves the first, for the most part, by refusing to write hyperbole. He achieves the second by supporting his core argument—that elites promote bonkers policies that have no effect on them while crushing the disadvantaged—with overwhelming evidence.

　　Writing through a child’s eyes, Henderson sometimes makes skilled use of a small child’s diction and cadence. What did you do at school today, Rob? Nothing. At some point, an editor has impressed on him the importance of letting nouns do the work (by putting a blue line through most of the book’s adjectives and adverbs).

　　Henderson avoids the misery memoir trap and interposes a degree of necessary distance between himself and the reader.

　　This flat style (I almost wrote “flat affect”) captures how he lived amid chaos without understanding what was going on around him. It’s then consistent for him to admit—in a candid way notably different from typical misery memoir—when chunks of his life are lost to remembrance. Troubled refuses to be neat and pat. The way he shifts gear in the last third—producing a searing analysis of poverty, class, and the value of family while launching ordnance at people who’ve landed on “Free Parking” in the Monopoly game of Life—is astonishing. You know misery memoir is definitively in the rear-view mirror when demographic and statistical analysis is both angrier and more accurate than the author’s actual personal history.

　　Among Henderson’s critics, popular anonymous Substacker “Holly MathNerd” wrote the best piece I’ve seen from someone who, like Henderson himself, has vaulted the class barrier and come up from familial instability and chaos. Both look back on their broken childhoods and wonder what set them apart. “I grew up in the kind of neighborhood where just about every boy either ended up in the US military or prison,” Holly observes, “and he gave me something I’ve needed for years: the language to articulate precisely why this dichotomy exists.” On her point, Henderson writes:

　　Even if a young man learns absolutely nothing during a military enlistment, that’s still four to six years he spent simply staying out of trouble and letting his brain develop; the same guy at twenty-four is rarely as reckless and impulsive as he was at eighteen. The reason my life didn’t go off the rails is because I wasjustself-aware enough to decide to have my choices stripped from me.

　　Henderson is best known for developing the concept of “luxury beliefs,” which are political ideologies and policy proposals that confer social status on the well-to-do folk who support them. Meanwhile, those same policies injure poor and working-class people when implemented at the state’s behest. His insight is startling and applies to many more interventions than obviously daft ones like defunding the police.

　　If Henderson is right in a larger sense than just the specific policy issues he canvasses in his book, we may need to revisit entire political ideologies and the core philosophical claims they make about human social organisation. It’s not just woke utopianism chained to the pillory and found wanting here. This emerges during a discussion of Isaiah Berlin’s positive and negative liberty. “I couldn’t help but apply these concepts to my own life,” he says. “For long stretches of my childhood, I had an abundance of negative liberty, and it simply allowed me to make a lot of bad decisions.”

　　On the negative liberty issue, I should disclose my own extensive background in drug policy debates and flag up that Henderson’s engagement with Berlin is at its best when he discusses cannabis legalisation. I mean, I’ve written for this magazine and elsewhere (I hope amusingly) on applying what I called “the marijuana measure of intellectual quality” or “The Bong Scale” to Judith Butler as an undergraduate.

　　However, I also care about the truth. Henderson is right to note that legalisation has had deleterious effects in poor areas, in addition to making major cities across the developed world stink of weed. Reminder: burning cannabis smells just as bad as burning tobacco. And given what we already know about combustion and the human lung, it’ll probably kill you just like cigarettes will kill you.

　　The reality that classical liberalism—the closest to my own political views, I admit—has at least a whiff of the luxury belief around it stings. It’s discomforting to acknowledge that what goes by the name of paternalism has its own intellectual pedigree, while liberalism can be a system developed by the clever, for the clever. “Highly educated and affluent people are more economically conservative and socially liberal,” Henderson says. “This doesn’t make sense. The position is roughly that people shouldn’t have to adhere to norms and if/when they inevitably hurt themselves or others, then there should be no safety net available. It’s a luxury belief.”

　　My response to Henderson’s drug policy claims is to highlight the importance of trade-offs. There is a reason why economists and law enforcement hate black markets. Unfortunately, cultural memory of Prohibition and just how murderously violent it was is receding as the Greatest Generation dies off. Whatever policy a given government adopts, drug harms among the poor—Henderson argues drugs “are often a gateway to further pain”—must be set off against the gang violence and mass incarceration that go with criminalisation.

　　Unlike Holly MathNerd, I’m probably best engaging with Henderson’s account of his time at Yale, where he makes some extremely tart and on-point observations of my tribe. British political scientist Sir Vernon Bogdanor calls us “the exam-passing classes,” and although we take somewhat varied forms across the Pond—two countries divided by a common language and all that—the difference is one of degree, not kind. Particularly relevant are descriptions of Machiavellianism among the Great and Good. This includes Henderson’s fellow Yalies hating Goldman Sachs (“a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”) for public consumption while applying for its internships in secret.

　　I’ve seen similar: law students who hid essential books in undergraduate advocacy (“mooting”) competitions, for example. When my father joined the Royal Navy during WWII, this sort of behaviour was evidence for “bad character.” If you were posh and advantaged, according to my dad, you had duties. That traditional class belief manifested in the UK’s terrifying casualty rates among its officer corps, especially in WWI.

　　In striving for accuracy, telling his story in chronological order, using a restrained style, and admitting where his memory has gone AWOL, Henderson avoids the misery memoir trap and interposes a degree of necessary distance between himself and the reader. His scholarship on luxury beliefs is an important reminder that liberalism—with its core claim that people’s choices matter because they are theirs, not because they are the right choices—has different implications for someone like me as compared to people with his background.

　　More broadly, Troubled is an excellent primer on the state of elite US higher education. Completed last year—before October 7 and a university presidents’ Congressional hearing now seared into the nation’s eyeballs—it captures the extent to which the activist output of universities is not, in any useful sense, about making things work. It pretends to be at some grandiose moral level but is nothing of the sort. Instead, clever people who’ve never had a difficult day in their lives get to parade their piety, while the Rob Hendersons and Robbie Waynes of the world are left to sink out of sight.