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We in American love stories of people who face some sort of adversity and then rise about it to achieve great things. It doesn’t even have to be that huge of a “great thing��; just pulling oneself out of crushing poverty and living the American dream is usually enough. With that in mind, I was looking forward to reading this memoir. Alas, the last few chapters did not sit well with me.

Rob Henderson was put into foster car when it was determined his mother, a drug addict, couldn’t take care of him. She was then deported back to South Korea, leaving him in the system. It wasn’t until he was eight or nine years old that he was adopted by the Hendersons, a couple with a 5-year-old daughter. For a few years, everything seemed to work well, but then the Hendersons divorced, and the father never really wanted anything to do with Rob as a means of hurting his ex-wife, who had entered in to a relationship with a woman named Shelly. Things really fell apart after Shelly was shot in an accident at a shooting range. Throughout his teen years, Henderson engaged in a lot of risky behavior, from alcohol to drugs to thrill seeking, in order to numb the pain of never feeling wanted or fitting in through his entire life.

After high school, he joins the Air Force, which gives him much needed structure, and it is that which leads him to apply to and be accepted to Yale. It’s at Yale that Henderson develops his theory of “luxury beliefs,�� which seems to be a code word for “woke politics.�� What’s harming America, Henderson opines, is how the wealthy are obsessed with status instead of something meaningful, and how they show that status is their “luxury beliefs,�� which the poor have no time for and couldn’t care less about because they have much bigger fish to fry. My first inkling of how problematic his theory would become was when Henderson defined cisgender as the fact that he “presents�� his gender as he was “assigned�� at birth, complete with quotation marks. He also equates polyamory with sexual promiscuity, instead of another way to form relationships. His idea that the liberal elites want to simply abolish the police also doesn’t account for the history of policing in America, how racist it tends to be, and the fact that our police force grew out of slave catching in the 1800s. My sense after finishing the last few chapters is that Henderson himself is just as naive as the liberal elites he’s trying to skewer, as he seems to see things in shades of black and white.

My heart goes out to that little boy who was abandoned again and again by people who were supposed to care about him, and a system that was supposed to help him. My heart aches for the teen who acted out again and again just try to feel something. My hope is that Henderson continue on with his therapy and that he is successful in breaking the cycle if he chooses to marry and have children.