IVO DAWNAY
Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
By Rob Henderson
Forum £16.99
Not many misery memoirs follow a trajectory from catastrophically unstable childhood to a PhD from Cambridge University. But then not many Cambridge PhDs would describe education as ‘a red herring’ when it comes to contentment with one’s lot in life.
Unlike our own, often Celtic, tradition of tortured upbringings – and to name but two – Henderson’s Californian version follows a classic Hollywood narrative