Frederick Douglass described in his famous memoir how, when his master discovered his wife teaching their young slave Frederick to read, he chided her: “If you teach him how to read, he’ll want to know how to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.” This realization — that reading helps you escape — motivated Douglass to secretly learn. And it was the critical first step in his development into a renowned writer and orator, annunciating with firsthand clarity the evils of life as a slave.

Rob Henderson’s powerful new memoir, Troubled, echoes this theme and experience, chronicling his childhood as a neglected foster kid. As with Douglass, Henderson’s deep literacy and learning, combined with a straightforward and thoughtful writing voice, allow him to translate the experiences of a dangerously underprivileged youth as few who endure privation as children are able to do. And these adversities and skills forged Henderson into a keen social critic and advocate for the supreme value of stable, loving families.

Like Douglass, Henderson describes the moment he realized that books help you to break free from an imprisoning life. He decided to apply himself (belatedly) to learning to read, and

something clicked. I suddenly understood not only each word, but also grasped the meaning of each sentence and could follow the overall story. It felt like magic. Reading the words projected coherent images and stories in my mind. This was a milestone in my life. From then on reading became a source of comfort for me.

As he explains, “Reading was an escape — from my memories, from my foster families, from my feelings.”

Henderson, now 33 and a Yale- and Cambridge-trained psychologist, had a lot to escape.

His birth mother came to the U.S. from South Korea for college but fell into drug addiction and unplanned pregnancies. His biological father left before he was born. His narrative opens with his earliest memory, at age three: police dragging his abusive mother away while he clings to her desperately.

Through the evocative lens of a small child’s memories, Henderson depicts his years bouncing between chaotic foster homes: a boy with no understanding of his life, of why he is moved constantly, with no lasting relationships. “If I had to reduce what I felt during these early childhood years to a single word,” he writes, “the only one I can think of is: dread.” Each placement has a hellish aspect; yet, with a child’s innate thirst for stability, Rob lives in fear of the next time he will be suddenly plucked up and moved into the unknown.

Finally, at age seven, he is adopted into a permanent, affectionate home, with a mom, dad, and younger sister, Hannah. But within two years, his new parents divorce. Most painfully, his father punishes his mother by completely blocking Rob from his life. This is a heartrending loss of the only father figure the boy would ever have. Further upheaval and tragedy follow.

We, the readers, root desperately for young Rob’s inner strengths to prevail over the hurts, disappointments, and uncertainties that fill him with loneliness, confusion, and rage. “Each time I moved, each time another adult let me down, and each time I let myself down, it was like tossing a Mentos into a Coke, sealing it, and believing everything would be fine,” he writes.

And although he’s an intelligent and innately decent child, every time the rug gets pulled out from under him, Rob’s interest in school and in his future plummets. We cringe when he stays up all night getting high with friends, initiates bloody fights, and smashes windshields. Our hopes rise when he excels at a busboy job or remains in the “smart kid” classes despite his lack of effort.

But as his home life becomes a string of disappointments and fractures, his behavior and his ability to chart a successful course deteriorate. He barrels toward the end of high school with no college or other plans, the accumulated chaos around him sabotaging his work ethic and potential. “At this point, the future didn’t yet feel real to me. So, why save for another day?”

Finally, as he is graduating from high school with no prospects, we breathe a sigh of relief that he enlists in the Air Force. It’s a turning point. He describes arriving to the military exam “hungover, exhausted, and hungry” but suddenly filled with determination to escape a past in which he never had a say over the instability created by the adults around him. His scores qualify him for every enlistee job.

Henderson excels in the military, getting promoted rapidly. His reflections on this period of his life are particularly powerful. The military, he discerns, understands the “latent impulsivity and stupidity” of young men. His ability to thrive under so much imposed structure is a revelation to him: “For behaviors and habits to be stable and predictable, one’s environment needs to be stable and predictable. I didn’t have discipline, mentorship, healthy camaraderie, and so on back home, but I had them now. My new, highly rigid environmental constraints kept me out of trouble.”

Henderson also realizes how innately teenage boys seek out destruction in the absence of consequences: “If you leave a group of seventeen-year-old boys alone long enough, something will usually happen.” And that “something” was always bad. “Somehow, we had all created a situation where the coolest person was the one who had most recently done the most dangerous thing.” All of his childhood friends without fathers end up in institutions — most in prison — and this reinforces Henderson’s appreciation of boundaries.

Despite achievement in the Air Force, Henderson wrestles with feelings of emotional numbness, devolving into alcoholism, which finally lands him in rehab. There, he begins to release some of the pain from early childhood: the feeling that he is unloved, unlovable, and unable to love. This cathartic journey leads him to higher education: first as an older undergrad at Yale and later as a Ph.D. student at Cambridge.

Rob’s culture shock in these elite institutions — and the revelations it sparks — are the real meat of the book.

The Yale undergrads who surround Henderson come from a foreign reality: cushy two-parent homes. Yet they perennially use words such as pain, danger, harm, and trauma to describe trivial experiences, like encountering an offensive Halloween costume. He divines that “broadcasting personal feelings of emotional precarity and supposed powerlessness” is “part of the campus culture,” and that “conspicuously lamenting systemic disadvantage seemed to serve as both a signal and reinforcer of membership in this rarefied group of future elites.”

Henderson is further disturbed and mystified by pervasive “luxury beliefs” whose “chief purpose . . . is to indicate the believer’s social class and education.” These include denigrating marriage, law enforcement, and the supposed evil of “white privilege.” The elites around him do not follow these professed beliefs (they themselves plan to marry, will live in policed neighborhoods, and will sacrifice nothing for being white) and are oblivious to how these stances hurt those who come from instability — like Henderson. “Most personal to me,” he writes, “is the luxury belief that family is unimportant or that children are equally likely to thrive in all family structures.”

Henderson’s ability to recognize the frivolousness of these beliefs and the damage they do, like his ability to escape the chaos of his childhood, shows a person with an incredible sense of personal agency. And running through the book is the connection between reading and developing the self-awareness to understand how you’re shaped by your environment — and how to transcend it.

Young Henderson reads constantly — even when ignoring his official education. As he gets older, he realizes that “reading about others who had survived the vicissitudes of their youth helped carry me through my turbulent childhood, too.”

How true this is of the fictional orphan protagonists who inspire us. Jane Eyre and Anne of Green Gables, formative heroines for generations of women, both experienced the pain of being unwanted, the upheaval of being shifted around, and the gap left by impermanent intimates. Both believed themselves too unattractive to be loved. And both triumphed, cultivating their innate intelligence and drive, by dwelling habitually in the happier worlds of their own powerful imaginations fed by books.

Henderson experiences among Ivy League elites a shocking lack of imagination. They are unable to conceive of an existence in which the behaviors and circumstances of success they take for granted are alien and inaccessible — or in which grown-ups behave like children, unable to support, stabilize, and love those around them.

Henderson’s memoir will resonate widely, and it’s easy to understand why. We sense a growing divide between the values promoted by elites and the realities of the most vulnerable. Troubled reveals a privileged generation failing to develop agency and instead embracing personal fragility. Its members seem largely unable to imagine others’ experiences and emotions, perhaps because they are unwilling to confront the daunting responsibility this would confer on them to sacrifice for those less fortunate.

Henderson, for his part, volunteers as a tutor to help kids like him surmount their setbacks. The same urge pushed him to write about his life: “I kept thinking about some kid like me out there who might pick this up and draw inspiration, the same way I did as a kid hanging out in my school’s libraries.” He movingly recounts advising a worried mom whose son was a slow learner to read to him. “But not because it will expand his vocabulary. Read to him because it will remind him that you love him.”

Ultimately, Henderson’s narrative is a reminder that learning should not be something we pursue to elevate ourselves over others. Instead, it should teach us our own potential, in an unstable world, to do great things for ourselves and others despite adversity.