When the American writer Rob Henderson was a baby, his mother would tie him to a chair so that she could get high uninterrupted. He was taken into foster care in Los Angeles at the age of three. His mother, who was South Korean, was deported and he lost all contact. He has never known his father. Henderson spent years being shuttled between foster homes, where he was frequently neglected and abused, until he was adopted at the age of seven. His adoptive family lived in Red Bluff, a low-income, high-crime small town in California, and for a while he experienced the familial warmth and stability that he’d always been denied. Then his parents’ marriage ended, his father cut him off and his life began to fall apart again. He believes he might have gone off the rails completely had he not signed up to the military. After thriving in the Air Force, he won a scholarship to Yale and from there moved to Cambridge, where he recently completed his PhD, and where I met him one afternoon in mid-March in a church café.
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