Cambridge PhD: How to Write a Memoir — Rob Henderson

When you're writing memoir, the question isn't who am I, but who am I in this story. How do you do this? Break it down. People like to make themselves look good, perhaps look better than they really are. So, you're going to go into a memoir a little bit suspicious. What you're saying is the more trepidation you have about sharing something, the more that you should put that in your memoir. I decided to bring the reader in with me and do all I could to resurface those old memories from living in a slum apartment in LA, placed into foster care, divorces, separations, remarriages, financial catastrophes.

So, how do you go from that to 300 whatever pages of a memoir? This is something I've only recently realized was Rob Henderson is the author of Troubled, which is a memoir about what it's like to grow up in the foster care system and what his life was like, how he got from that to then going to Yale and Cambridge and enrolling in the military. If you want to learn to tell your personal story, how to write a memoir, then this episode is for you. What you're going to learn how to do is how to go back into your past, how to excavate the depths of what you've been through and put your experiences on the page in a way that's therapeutic for you and captivating and entertaining for others. So, if you're somebody who wants to get better about personal writing, writing your own experiences, you're going to love this episode with Rob Henderson.

So, Rob, why did you decide to write

this book? We'll get going with some momentum here. By the time I got to college, um I started to interact with a lot of different people and over time I would divulge pieces of my life to them and I would see the look of shock and sometimes horror on their faces. And gradually I came to recognize that there's an entire segment of society, that segment of society, the whatever you want to refer to them as, the elite, the future ruling class, what have you, that really has no first-hand connection to uh the places where I grew up, the kinds of people that I interacted with up until um I arrived at Yale.

And so at some point I I made this decision you know, first or second year of college, maybe someday I'll write a book. Probably middle-age, maybe later, sometime in the distant future. But forces aligned and you know, different kinds of interactions occurred. I met different kinds of people and decided um to write this book much sooner than I'd anticipated and I was nervous about it because you know, writing a I mean, I think I started writing the book I was 29 or 30 and it I felt a little um you know, it's it's it's immodest to write a book at such a young age.

Right. Right. And I remember I had this conversation with a professor at Cambridge, Cambridge, England when I was doing my my PhD and I was telling him, "Yeah, I'm writing this book, but I'm having these doubts and these uncertainties and it's just like, am I too young to write a book like this?" And he, you know, in his very posh British accent, he was like, "Oh, come on, you know, writing a book at such a young age, it's it's an American tradition, you know, like" he was telling me, you know, people people like Tara Westover and J.D. Vance and so many others. Barack Obama wrote Dreams from My Father, I think he was in his early 30s. And so a lot of people, yeah, do write memoirs at a young age, especially if they've had unique life experiences. So I decided um yeah, to just go for it and in hindsight, I'm glad I did it this way because you know, as you get older, memory is already imperfect regardless, but

you know, when you try to recall those childhood memories as you get older, it becomes harder, they become fuzzier and less specific and detailed. But you know, I was still young writing this book and I could recall with a lot of clarity and vividness just what my early childhood was like. And I also had the benefit of having my friends. You know, when when you're very old, a lot of your friends are dead. And you know, I've talked to people who've written their own autobiographies and memoirs and they're like, "Yeah, my It was hard to find those sources for to corroborate different memories." But for me, my friends are young, my younger sister, my adopted sister who I write about, I spoke with her.

And yeah, we could kind of see do we share the same recollections of what occurred. And their memories are also very fresh, too. So, there were benefits, I think, also to writing a book like this at such young age.

So, tell me this. What did you learn in the process about writing memoirs? Like, what do you know now that you didn't know when you started? I thought I was ready for it right away because I had written so many personal essays on my newsletter. I'd written a couple of personal essays in the New York Times and other outlets. And I just thought, you know, a book will be like that, but longer. Um and once I sat down and realized, you know, whatever the the book contract said 80, 85,000 words, that's 300 something pages and I'm like, "Oh, that's 300 pages is very different from 1,000 words or 3,000 words."

Um and I I was paralyzed for I think the first 6 months. And I started to ask other memoirists for their advice, reading books about writing. And over time I came to learn that a memoir is not just a a loose heap of anecdotes of just here's this thing that happened to me, here's this other thing. Um and then and then and then and then you get to the end. Right. Rather, a memoir is supposed to center around a specific theme. Um

what are what do you want the reader to get from this story? What does each story you're telling communicate and how do they all tie back to that one specific theme or maybe two specific themes? So, would that be this? Foster care, family, and social class, which is on the cover. Were those the three themes? Those were the themes. Specifically family, but family, foster care, social Those are all kind of tied up with one another.

Um and I wanted to communicate that you know, we talk a lot about class, social mobility, what are the predictors of success. And with this book, I wanted to talk about family instability and fragmentation, deterioration, how a lot of this Of course, there are material factors here, economic inequality, poverty, all of those things matter. But I wanted to communicate that yes, that was a part of my life, but what was really sort of weighing me down as I was growing up was the repeated instability, moving to different homes, divorces, separations, remarriages, financial catastrophes, um often adults making uh poor decisions. And then later, as a result of that, making poor decisions myself. I have this line early in the preface that when adults let children down, they learn to let themselves down.

Mhm. And that was true in my case. It was true in the cases of many of my my friends as well. And so, at some point during that sort of

6-month period between signing the deal and actually sitting down to write the book, I came across this line, um when you're writing memoir, that the question isn't who am I, but who am I in this story. Mhm. And I thought about that for a long time. And I realized that I was approaching the book entirely wrong. I thought I was going to write this kind of retrospective account. Oh, back when I was a kid, here's what happened, and here's some research, and here's some statistics. Kind of you know, people who may be familiar with some of my other writing or my Substack, they know that I like to draw on research and psychology and sociology.

And that's how I thought this book was going to be. Um the adult Rob, you know, there's this idea of um the voice of innocence and the voice of experience in memoir. So, the voice of

innocence is you're communicating the story from your perspective at that specific age. You're an innocent person totally blind to why these things are happening and the context surrounding it. You don't even know why you're making the decisions you're making. And then the voice of experience is you're looking back in hindsight. Now you know, oh, I did that because of this or this person did that because I did this and you have that context.

And that's how I thought I was going to write from the voice of experience, but instead I realized I had to write from the voice of innocence because I wanted to bring the reader in with me. I looked online and asked around for memoirs like this. Are there memoirs written by foster kids who've had unusually successful outcomes. There are very few of them. Most foster care memoirs are written by foster parents who talk about their experience raising kids.

Mhm. But there aren't many from the perspective of the children and so I it's possible that this will be, you know, sort of one of the very few that a reader will ever encounter, maybe the only one. And so I decided to bring the reader in with me and do all I could to resurface those old memories from when I was with my mom um living in a slum apartment in LA um the feeling that I had the only two memories of being taken from her by the police, placed into foster care um seeing her in handcuffs uh the emotions that came up when I would have to move to different foster homes every few months um and not just the feeling of instability and inner turmoil from being moved, but also seeing my foster siblings taken.

And so I was writing each chapter from that perspective. Okay, I'm 3 years old here, I'm 6 years old here, I'm 9 years old here. And trying my best to recall what it was like to be a kid during that time. And I found it was actually like easier than I expected. A lot of those memories were fresher um than I would have predicted. Uh I can still recapture that. How did these words foster care, family, social class, how did they serve as a

kind of prism and a razor that you used in the editing process to say if it doesn't connect to those things, I'm going to cut it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I I yeah, I wanted to center the entire story around these themes, around family, around class, social mobility. And yeah, there were there were stories that were you know, the the original manuscript was maybe 100,000 words and I ended up cutting whatever 20% of it, something like that.

And initially, right, you want to you want to write more than you need. Um you know, it's much easier to build a sculpture from a giant block of ice than to take a little ice cube and turn it into something. And so I just poured everything, you know, every story that I could remember, every single meaningless, pointless interaction I ever had with my friends that for whatever reason I I remembered, that was kind of my Well, if I remember it, it must mean something.

Was this like in a doc? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had like an like a master doc of like everything in it. And then, through the editing process, does this center around these themes? You know, does this pointless interaction matter? You know, because I think I tell maybe one or two very um you know, kind of amusing but also um uh you know, foolish stories of me drinking when I was a teenager. And I had way more than two. I mean, I had maybe I I could probably call a dozen of those.

But do I need to tell all 12 stories for the reader to get the idea that yeah, I was a stupid kid who would drink and drive and get into trouble and race my friends on the freeway or whatever. And you don't need to tell that story four or five And it what's funny is like even even then like even though I paired it down to just those two, I still sometimes will see these reviews and they're like, "Yeah, it got a little repe- repetitive these these teenage antics."

There are um passages in the middle of the book where I'm talking about my experience in the military. And honestly like day-to-day military life is like mind-numbingly boring. Mhm. Like it's just like vast stretches of nothing with periods of like very high ops tempo, very fast-paced. But I didn't want to take the reader through like all of that sort of minutia of here's how do you how you make a like a bed with perfect corners and here's how you fold your like what basic training is actually like is just so yeah.

But Yeah.

that what you just said, here's how you make a bed with perfect corners. What's really interesting what you unintentionally just did was you shared an anecdote in one sentence. And you don't need to take somebody through the whole thing, but just the fact that you said, "Here's how you make a bed with perfect corners." You actually just communicated so much about what it's like being in the military. And I think that's a lot of the art of good writing and making something come alive is you don't need your anecdotes to be a whole chapter. It can just be one sentence or one phrase or one little thing here Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then just you're right. And then the reader can infer, "Oh, like that was what life was like is like this minutia around bed making."

And so yeah, I think I glossed over kind of the mundane realities of military training in maybe one or two pages. But yeah, I could have stretched I think the original draft Yeah, I must have stretched it on for eight or nine pages and really like you just gloss right over it, right? Like that's sort of the like the magic of storytelling. I distinctly remember You know, I have like movie references and pop culture references in the book from when I was a kid the '90s, the 2000s. And I remember in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base like just how you know, like you wake up at 4:45, go to physical training the whole thing.

And I remember in the back of my mind thinking like the training montages in movies go by so fast, but in real life training is just endless. Right? It's like like 8 weeks in a real life versus, you know, 45 seconds in a movie. And yeah, and it's like that with writing. You know, I have to communicate very quickly. Here's what training was like. Here's what day-to-day life was like. But you know, give the reader a sense of it and move right along. And so that's something else that that I learned is that you have to make it interesting to the reader while also trying to be true to the actual experience.

There's something here too around around time. And time dilutes in a memoir. So you have things like that with exactly the example you just shared. Then a movie, the training is 30, 45 seconds even though it's actually 8 months long. But it's funny in my head, your move from Los Angeles to Red Bluff, you get on the airplane, you're going up, it's like this long drive with these new parents. You really stretch that out because that's an important moment. And so it's the expansion and the contraction.

That's where you can emphasize certain things, too. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, because it was a it was a big move for me.

The other thing that you were conscious about was not making yourself look too good. Taking out stories that made you look like, "Wow, I'm Rob Henderson." Tell me about that. Well, I mean, so again, you know, I have some stories in the book about you know, the same kind of theme or interaction, but I had to pare it down. And so violence was pervasive. Like fist fights, wrestling, all these kinds of things. And you know, getting punched, you know, breaking fingers, breaking bones.

And there were, you know, I think most of the fights in the book I lose. But in real life I won some fights, too. But I'm like, do I need to tell that story of winning some fight? What does it communicate? What's the point? And so and funnily enough, you know, the fights that made some kind of difference in my life or had a kind of supported the general point of the book, these were fights that I lost and those are the ones that stood out to me.

And so those were the ones I told yeah getting beaten up or getting sucker punched or getting jumped or all those kinds of things. Those were all those often occurred when my life was sort of unraveling or spiraling out of control. Often when I would like win fights, that's usually when you know I was I was managing to contain my energy or my impulses toward toward uh acting out or risk risk-taking behaviors. Um there were other things too. So in in the final foster home I lived in I tell a story in the book of how I nearly drowned. And you know drowning doesn't look like it does in the movies. You know people think of drowning and like oh you're splashing and flailing and screaming for help.

What real drowning typically looks like is treading water. Like you're just trying to keep your head above and trying to like ask for air and you don't have enough oxygen to start calling for help. That was actually how a lot of kids die drowning like a a crazy number of kids each year drown in swimming pools because people don't know what drowning looks like. Mhm. Um and so I'm treading water and I'm trying to like frantically grab the side of the pool. My foster mom sees me and she you know takes her time getting the pool rake, extends it out. She's she has a a cordless phone and she's like kind of talking to her friend as she's pulling me out and I'm like frantically trying to breathe. She pulls me out and um you know for me this was like this very scary moment but for her it was you know she she was not not the most sort of nurturing and warm foster mother.

Um And I tell other stories these interactions that I had with her but later about let's see so I was seven then so I was nine nine and a half after I was adopted. I was at this party and so I I told this story in the original version of the book and I took it out. And this is one of those things where it made me look too good, so I had to drop it. It was my younger sister's friend's birthday, so we were at her friend's parents' house or family house. It was like her sixth birthday, something like that.

And me, my sister, a bunch of other little kids were surrounding the birthday cake. We see all these presents, admiring all the gift-wrapped presents. What's inside of these? What did you know, what did she get? And it was a pool party, and there was a swimming pool, and in the distance one of my sister's friends, the little girl, she was in the pool kind of treading water, and people were ignoring her. And this was I mean, this was the late '90s.

Probably parents then were a little less attentive than they are now. This was like, you know, parents were drinking beer and barbecuing, and kind of loud music. They were doing their own thing, and they're like, "Oh, you know, the kids can handle themselves." And um but I knew what drowning looked like, because I had drowned, and I recognized that kind of, you know, that that kind of um paddling movement that she was doing.

Sure. And so I ran over, and I pulled her out of the pool, and um you know, it was funny, cuz at the time we didn't even make a big deal. We didn't tell anyone. I just pulled her out, and like, "Are you okay?" And she's like, "Yeah, I think I'm okay." And like, "Okay." Just went back to the birthday cake, and like, you know, as a little kid, those aren't like profound moments. But um in hindsight, uh you know, that was like a big moment for me of just like Yeah, cuz I told my sister that, and and she was shocked by it. Years later I told her that story.

And so I put it in the book originally, and then I thought to myself, "Why is this in here? What is How does it center on these three themes? Is it about me? What does it communicate? And ultimately I came to the conclusion that, you know, I put it in there because of my own ego. You know, I tried to maybe stretch this connection with oh, I drowned, and then I learned this lesson, and helped someone else, or but I that's not what I was thinking as a 9-year-old kid.

Um that's not what was going on. And so I ended up dropping it.

Let's talk about stories. How did you think about what kind of stories were story-worthy, worthy of sharing? And how did you think about the pacing of specific stories? Um so first I just told every story like I mentioned. I literally put down every single story I could possibly remember. And then going through it again, I reread it um tried to fill in the details and then I lingered on it and if it me it made me feel something, then I would keep it.

And it wasn't it's not necessarily a rational process of well, this is bringing up these emotions and these feelings in these ways in this order. It was more so a gut feeling of like I'm feeling something. Um often it was just fear of like this kind of self-consciousness of like this makes me look bad or I feel very vulnerable revealing this about myself. Mhm. And the stronger that feeling was, the more likely I was to keep it in. And so That's a great insight.

Yeah. The more scared Yeah. the more vulnerable you feel Yeah. trepidation you have about sharing something, the more that you should put that in your memoir. the feeling of possibly being judged or looked upon as weak or pathetic um powerless, defenseless and so yeah, the intensity of those emotions correlated with the likelihood of me retaining the story in the book. The other thing was it was kind of a Darwinian process writing this book where of course like I would give it a first pass as after I put all the stories down, I would go through okay, do I like this story or not like but like is this story um consistent with the themes of the book? Should I keep it in? How does it make me feel?

And then I started sending it to different writer friends, author friends, people that I knew who were accomplished in some way in writing. And I would ask them to give me some feedback, um ask them some questions, and if they gave if if more than if two or more of my writer friends came back with the same piece of feedback, then I would almost always incorporate it. Yeah, cuz it's it's very messy. There's a lot of noise with these kinds of things.

Writing to some extent is subjective. You can send the same piece of writing to two very qualified and talented editors and get completely opposite Yeah. um pieces of feedback. Um but I figured, you know, if I send this thing out to 10 writers and of those 10 two of them say, "Hey, you need to cut this. This doesn't make sense." or "Can you say a little bit more about this?" or you know, "These stories aren't intersecting properly." that usually meant like, "Okay, I need to do something about this." So, it was just that process of asking people, um "Did you get bored? Where did you get bored?"

And if two people said this story bored them, I would just cut it. If two people said this story's excellent, then I would I would retain it even if by the time I got to the editing stage with my publisher, I would I would battle to keep it. Um And so, yeah, it was just that sort of process of trusting myself but also trusting that um you know, that idea of of that interrater reliability of multiple people giving the same kind of advice, I would follow.

And the pacing, tell me about that. So, I knew in advance that this I didn't want it to be like a misery memoir. I didn't want people to just like come away feeling down. Um So, one thing that I did right away in chapter one was I basically started at the end where I talk about my Yale graduation right away. Right. And that was essentially to communicate to the reader that this story is going to have a happy ending, but we're going to have a lot of difficulty and obstacles and setbacks and pain to get through before we get there.

And

you know, I've seen reviews and multiple people have multiple people have mentioned this that I'm glad you did that because if we started right from when you're being taken from your mother, I don't know if I could have gotten through this book. Mhm. So, they knew, okay, there's going to be this ending. How does How does it happen? Um And so then for each chapter, I tried to structure it in that way of like high low high low of tell this story that's kind of a downer, but then the next story try to tell something entertaining or amusing to get the reader to laugh.

Emotional variance. Exactly. So, each chapter it has to have a few of those emotional upticks, downswings, and so on. And then um And then from chapter to chapter, I tried to have that where like maybe one chapter is particularly um you know, induces this kind of feeling of low mood in the reader, but the next chapter will bring the reader up a little bit. And so, I tried to do that within chapters and then kind of across chapters, too.

Uh and it was hard. I mean, I don't know how successful I was at that, but I didn't want to be um entirely um sad or entirely happy. I wanted to have that Yeah, that emotional variance. And I think that also sort of introduces some novelty and introduces a bit of um what uh diversity, I suppose, in in the reader's experience. Is your writing something like this and

you're going through many different years or you're telling a memoir that happens over 25, 30 years, how do you think of the voice changing? You know, you're there's 5-year-old kid and now you're 12 years old and now you're at Yale and Cambridge. You're a completely different person. Like you're you go from, "Hey, I don't like to read at all" to, "Wait, oh my goodness, I can read things and these letters actually are supposed to impart a story" and then you're like a Cambridge student. So, how does the voice change throughout throughout the piece?

Well, yeah, I tried to tell each chapter from that perspective. And so, over time the language it starts out very in that kind of plain style, very straightforward, very unsophisticated. Um and then each chapter it becomes slightly more complex. And then by the end, I'm just speaking with like the voice that I have now, the way that I normally write. But it was difficult at first, you know, I I had to go back and think, okay, how was I thinking about the world when I was 7 or 8 years old?

Um how did my friends and I speak? How do we communicate? What's an example of this? Like, what is something that you would say when you're 7, 8 that like you definitely wouldn't say now, and how does that show up in the book? Yeah, I mean, one thing that that comes immediately to mind is just that uh that the story I told when my my adoptive parents um they sent this video cassette uh to my final foster mother to show me.

And it was their way of introducing themselves to me. Um and so she popped this cassette into the VCR, and the first thing they say is, "Hi Rob." Or "Hi Robbie." Or something. And I'm looking and I'm just shocked. I'm like, "Wow, it's true. Like, people on TV can see us just like we can see them." And I tell that story in the book of when you're a little kid, a lot of little kids have this feeling of like, "Okay, we can see them. Can they see us?

Are they watching me the way that I'm watching them?" And yeah, I I I tell that that that story in the book. This is how style and substance can work together, where you have the substance of what you're saying, and obviously you're trying to communicate what you went through as a kid. But this is where style comes in. Hey, what words did I use? What was the passage of time like? Hey, I'm a short kid. Like, what are the sorts of things that I would see? And almost inhabiting that childish mind really adds texture and life to what it is that you're saying beyond just I was in this foster care system, and then I dealt with this thing. If you can really inhabit who you were at that time. And it's funny cuz at the beginning of the book, you you're like, "This is what I did, so don't get mad at me for saying things that I wouldn't say now.

yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, the words they're like the words that we would use yeah, today would be considered offensive or insensitive or what have you, but those I mean those words are still thrown What's funny is that I I sent this book to a school teacher who herself is an author and somewhere in the book I say, you know, back back then, you know, when I was in high school kids would throw around this word gay as a synonym for bad. Oh, that's so gay.

Yeah. And I said that's what kids used to do. That's what I wrote. And she wrote me back saying, "Kids still do that." And I'm like, "Oh, okay, I didn't know that." Now, to be fair, she is a teacher at an inner-city high school where, you know, maybe they they don't have the sort of, you know, the genteel manners of upper-middle-class parents who like are so sensitive about language, but yeah, she was telling me, you know, maybe things haven't changed as much as I thought, but I did want to communicate to the reader, look, I know this language is bad and offensive and what have you, but this was like everyday. You know, and that was something I wrestled with, too, was do I want to communicate this? How much do I want to sanitize what life was like back

then in terms of the language, the violence, the drugs, the bad decisions? And I decided to just put it in there. Yeah. ever a time where honesty is not the way that you want to go? So far at every juncture you've said I've just been more honest, more true. Is there ever a time where you don't want to do that? think when it comes to other people, maybe. Um so, when it came to myself, I tried to be as honest as I could.

And I'm sure there were areas where I fell short, you know, self-deception being what it is. Maybe I I There's probably even more dirt that I could have dug up, but I just didn't. But when it comes to writing about others, I wanted to be fair. I wanted to be um you know, I didn't want to like make people look worse than than they would have been okay with. And so, I think that is Those are Those are harder decisions. Um when it comes to your experience of them, your memories of them, um I think it's good to be as honest as possible. But then when it comes to sort of rendering judgment or um trying to make some kind

of character evaluation of another person, I think it's better to just refrain from doing that. I think for myself, I would comment it here and there like this was a bad decision or I'm embarrassed about this. But for others, I wouldn't um have made that kind of um meta commentary. What's the story in here that was the hardest to include in the final book? You were like, "I can't do that. I I I I can't ship it." And And why? How'd you get the courage to fight through that?

Uh the story that was the hardest. Um There were So, there were two that come immediately to mind. So, one was the the chapter where I went to rehab cuz I've never talked about that or written about that in any other uh capacity. I've never written an essay, I've never posted anything on my newsletter. That was completely new for a lot of people and I think unexpected. Um And then the other that was really hard for me to put down on the page was that the scene in the movie theater parking lot with my mom and her partner Shelly and their kind of separation and breakup. Um Yeah, because I I think that even it was hard for me, but it was also hard because I knew like it would be hard for my mom to relive that through reading it. And my sister was there too. And that was like a very um emotionally challenging moment for for all of us. Um and so, yeah, I just didn't want to you know, put anyone through any more

pain than they had already had experienced at that time. But it was for me a very vivid memory and it was one of several things that occurred in short succession that led me to enlist in the military. So, I had to put it in there. Uh Um but, you know, there were moments where I was like, is there any other way that I could communicate this without telling that story? And um at the end I had I had to keep it in. One of the things with your alcohol struggles that really struck me was that my sense is that you weren't able to process what you had been through.

There's this beautiful question and answer where you get asked, "Why did you feel comfortable expressing your anger but no other negative emotions?" And you say, "Because I didn't want to move again. I thought that if I cried or showed other signs of pain, then maybe they'd put me in another home." Yeah. And what I take from that is that you were just suppression, suppression, suppression. Both suppression with others, but also suppression with yourself.

And now you're writing a memoir and you have to do exactly the opposite, this like radical vulnerability. Yeah. Yeah, I remember that. Because at some point, what I what I think happened was that those the relocations and the emotions got intertwined and I kind of confused cause and effect there as a little kid where what I I'm I moved and then I cried, but at some point I thought, "Oh, I'm crying and that's why they're moving me."

Right. And that somehow stuck with me even as an adult, those two things, such that, you know, I I just suppressed it. You know, the sadness, the the um emotional turmoil. And yeah, I it took a long time I think for me to, you know, I I I describe the sort of uncovering all of that and how I managed to deal with it weirdly through drinking where almost regardless of what I was feeling, the drinking became the excuse where if I was happy, I would drink and then I could say, "Oh, I'm happy because I'm drinking."

Uh "Oh, I'm sad. Well, I'll start drinking and that'll sort of control the the emotions and anything bad that happens as a result, I can blame the alcohol." And I I never had to sort of address my feelings directly. Um and and really, I mean, we the substance abuse and the interest in finding different ways to chase, you know, chemical buzz, it started I mean, I I talk about how I started drinking beer in the foster homes when I was five. And then we started drinking tequila when I was nine. And then cigarettes and as a kid, it was it was hard to deal with those feelings. And so I, you know, what's around me? How do I How do I forget? Oh, okay, I'll take

these pills and drink this alcohol. There's something that I struggle with, which is writing my own personal experience. And two things. The first is excavating the depths and bringing that stuff out. That's one thing. But then the second thing is knowing what's interesting and what's not interesting. To me, it's like, well, it's my experience. I went through it. Of course it's interesting. And I have a very hard time making a value judgment on what to keep and what to remove.

What's me interesting, what's boring. How did you think about both getting the stuff out and then knowing what to keep and what to cut? Yeah. Uh yeah, the excavation, I don't want to say it was it was easy, but it was that like the vomit draft of just pouring it all out there, everything, every detail, every meaningless interaction. Just get it down on the page first. You can figure it out later. So that rehab chapter, it it's So in the book, it's very streamlined, but originally, it was this big bloated mass. And then, you know, to your earlier point about the the language changing over time in the book, it was funny. I I I I battled with my editors on this question of because I remember I would send them the early chapters just to get a little feedback from them. What are you guys thinking about and how how does this look? And the early chapters the very common response was this language

is too simple. Um it's too unsophisticated like can we elevate the prose a bit? And you were like no. No, that is literally the opposite of what I'm trying to do. I fought them on that and I said you don't understand what I'm doing yet but you know maybe it and then that's when I said okay well let me you know once I send the later chapters you'll kind of understand you know how I'm telling the story. at the time did you not have the note about this is how I'm going to do it because it wasn't an issue for me because you told me at the beginning of the book this is how I'm going to write the thing. Did they not have that information? that yet. I didn't know.

Well at that point I think I did know but I hadn't told them. It hadn't sort of sunk in and and really become a like concrete strategy yet. It was just this thing that was existing in the back of my mind. Right. And but I told them that this was the plan and I could tell they were a little apprehensive like okay send us the other chapters you know once once we have a bit more we can see what we can do. And then and then it was funny because then I would send them the later chapters and the advice was the opposite.

Make it simpler. Make it simpler. Yeah yeah and I was dumbing down the Exactly like you know especially the chapters at Yale came and then they were like oh you know like you you know I you may you may lose the reader with some of these sentences with some of the the language choices or the word choices. And and actually it was funny for for those I did listen to them because I didn't I I wanted the reader to follow along. I didn't want them to uh think that I was being purposely abstruse or something and so when whenever they asked me to to simplify the language I would try to do so but if they tried to ask me to elevate it I would almost never do it. Um you know that was one goal with this book um was so that like a curious 12-year-old could pick it up and understand it. And I have had that experience now where little kids will tell me they read the book and sometimes I wonder if it's I don't know

if it's necessarily appropriate for kids, but it is comprehensible to kids. And and I mom read it, you know, my mom didn't go to college and she read this book and she said, "Yeah, I appreciated that I was able to understand this book from start to finish." Um you know, I didn't write it to impress other people with PhDs. Well, it's funny cuz even the you have the citations at the bottom of of every page. Mhm. At the beginning of the book, no citations.

Mhm. At the end of the book, sometimes you have three or four on one page. So, even just in the increasing number of citations, we can see how your thinking changes, how you change, and like you're literally an academic now with citations at its core. But as a as a 4-year-old kid, a 7-year-old kid, no, there's nothing to say. You're just telling your story. Yeah, that was a kind of a tightrope that I had to walk of trying to communicate to the reader, okay, so here's this kid mired in squalor and chaos and instability. So, how does he go on to enlist in the Air Force and then get into Yale and get a PhD? Like how do I tell that story in a way that's like believable to the reader, too? Right?

Because that's that's one of the things about sort of telling telling even real-life narrative stories is like if you don't communicate it in the right way, people won't believe you even if it really happened. And so, I had to tell this story in a way that the reader can follow along and understand at each step, okay, this I I understand this, I accept it, it's believable. And now I understand how he got to where he is now. And yeah, that was that was kind of um I had to make these kind of strategic choices throughout the book of you know, revealing to the reader that I had difficulty early on in school. I didn't know how to read when I was in second grade. Eventually, I did become this curious kid. I read a lot, but that habit kind of waxed and waned. That underlying potential was always there.

Um so that by the time I do start to become more academically focused, the reader can see that and understand it and believe it rather than I barely graduated high school and then I get to Yale and there's no connective tissue in between. That can be very jarring, I think. So, I had to find ways to to insert those stories about myself in the book. I don't want to let you off the hook for

getting into how you excavated the really difficult emotional experiences. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it was I I lived it, you know, the better part of four years writing this book where yeah, I I put everything down and I would try to you know, I had different strategies for how I would attempt to resurface memories. I listened to the music from the era. I had a Spotify playlist from the '90s. Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, the best one.

And yeah, I ordered the same food and like drinks, you know, like I I bought Dr. Thunder from Walmart that I hadn't done in, I don't know, 15, 20 years. Um eating generic Yeah, go to In-N-Out. Eating generic cookies and you know, you know, I wouldn't eat a lot, but I would smell them, you know, I'd open the package and and I would just try to immerse myself in it as best I could. Wow. And yeah, all these memories would start to to come back to me.

So, you're saying is you activated your other senses. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I mean that's I mean that's interesting. Like smell in particular seems to have like the strongest connection with with memory. long long-term memory. Yeah, and and sort of retrieving those those old recollections. And yeah, like you know, I remember I had this, you know, when I was stationed in Germany, my ex at the time bought me this scented candle and I bought that same candle trying to remember what was what was my life like, you know, in 2012, 2013 when I was this 21-year-old kid living in Germany, um stationed at Ramstein Air Base.

So, yeah, it was tough, man. It was like So, during the process of writing, I would bring up these memories, do all these little tricks and strategies and approaches, and then I would take naps in the middle of the afternoon. And I'm I usually don't take naps. I'm not a nap person. But after a stretch of writing, suddenly I would just pass out. I would just fall asleep for an hour and then come to and and, you know, do something else, but you know, at the time it was funny. I you know, I I attributed it to like cuz this was kind of during the lockdowns during COVID. And I that was what I was like, "Oh, you know, we're all sad.

We're all depressed because we're all locked inside and that's why I'm sleeping." Um but really what was probably going on is just the level of emotional difficulty and pain of reliving all of these things. And yeah, it would just be emotionally exhausting. And it was a a different like I mean, just amazing cuz writing is you know, you think you're just sitting down at a computer and typing. Yeah, yeah, it's just writing. You're just thinking. And I was writing this book at the same time I was writing my PhD thesis. And the And I would alternate.

Wow, you really took it easy. And and I would I would like I would be so grateful. Like, "Oh, tomorrow's a PhD thesis day, not a book day." Because that kind of writing Said no one ever. Because that kind of writing is more natural It comes more naturally and easily to me. Like the later chapters of this book were so much easier to write than the early chapters, right? Because it's more detached, observational, sociological, like you said, more footnotes, more academic in the style. But those early memories, man, it was just like I would dread it.

I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my goodness. Tell me about this. In one of your sub- that piece that you wrote, "Sometimes I'd wake up at 3:00 a.m. because a long dormant memory would resurface. I dashed to my computer and start typing before it faded away." Yeah. Yeah. I mean, cuz I I I made the mistake of waking up in the night, remembering something, and like, "I'll definitely remember this when I wake up." And I never did. And so, I learned my lesson. And yeah, anytime something came to I'd I'd have these You have these memories of you know, just just um things I hadn't thought about in years.

Um, yeah, like, you know, that that uh story in the book of of, you know, vomiting at the Jack in the Box drive-thru. I hadn't thought about that and you know, I was I was kind of it's like shameful, right? And so, I did, you know, a lot of your, like, you know, and this is like verified, corroborated in psychological research that, you know, memories that we're ashamed of or embarrassed about or make us look bad, we try to forget those. Those kind of get put in the recycling bin of our minds. But, through doing everything I could to bring those memories back, it's, you know, some part of my unconscious mind was searching and going through these semi-conscious squirrels of memory and, you know, when I was asleep sometimes they would come up. And yeah, I would, you know, rummaging through them and uh then I'd sit at my computer at 3:00 a.m. and just type down a few sentences.

And yeah, the next morning I'd wake up and fill in all the blanks and try to remember what else. I'd call up an old friend, "Do you remember that time we were at Jack in the Box? What do you remember?" And yeah, try to try to put it all together. So, yeah, it was it was a really uh in a lot of ways it was really unpleasant period of time writing this book. And it was funny because when I started, I I kind of approached it as like, "I'm a fully grown man. I was in the Air Force, you know, I'm about to get a PhD. I'm like, you know, everything in my life is good. Everything's great. This is like the most comfortable, financially secure I could have ever hoped for. So, I can go back and kind of tell this story."

And no, these it was, you know, the wounds were fresher than I thought. And the feelings were all still there. And day-to-day, you know, you don't most people don't spend their days sitting around thinking about their childhood, but if you do that, Uh-uh. Warning sign. Yeah, and and so, I'm you know, it's it's funny like in a way I think I'm I'm glad I wrote it because it's there and I don't have to think about it, right?

Because I've sort of it's been sort of cognitively outsourced into the book and if I want to revisit it, I can, but I don't have to think about it anymore. Um and yeah, I can't imagine ever writing a book like this again. Um there are kind of professional memoirists who seem to write essays about themselves quite regularly, very good, but I yeah, I can't do that. That was like the one and done. Here's the story and uh and it's probably for the best, honestly. Um I think good stories in general are driven by conflict and the first 30 years of my life, 25 years, there was a lot of it, but you know, no one wants to read about my life now. It's pretty boring now. So, you know, it's uh yeah, it was the right time to write it and then maybe the right time to stop doing any more of these types of books.

What did you learn about writing dialogue? What makes for good dialogue?

Writing dialogue doesn't actually sound like conversation. Conversation is much messier than dialogue, but dialogue can't be too clean either as otherwise it doesn't sound believable. Hm. Um and so yeah, it was you know, there were there were conversations I had as a little kid with this therapist that I had to see, um this woman Janet, and I had to come, you know, remember the language of this, you know, 40-something-year-old woman and then communicate the dialogue of my, you know, 10-year-old self and remember what that sounded like and the kinds of beats of those patterns of conversation.

Um those were actually some of the more challenging parts was was the dialogue actually. Um so I went through those over and over, you know, what was this person like, how do they speak, um does it does it feel real, will the reader believe it, do I believe it? And even my own language over time changing and evolving and maturing. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, those were those were challenging um to because it it's also not entirely true, right? Like those are probably the least accurate in some ways, right? Because everything else, you remember oh the this happened and this this sort of interactions occurred and um the sequence of events, but then who actually remembers word for word what someone said even last week?

Right. Right? But I had to sort of even if it wasn't factual, it had to be truthful. Right. It had to be faithful to the spirit of that interaction of a kid and a therapist or a kid and his friends. And and to yeah, does does it actually seem to get at something that that has to that that requires dialogue and not some other form of storytelling? Sure. Yeah. So, you're talking about Janet, your therapist, and I want to just read it back and forth and then we can talk through it.

Janet is your therapist and you write, "Janet remained silent. I shrugged. The teacher told us the guy who shot him was probably on drugs or drunk or whatever. She told the class it was sad or like tragic that he died so young. That's terrible. Can you tell me a little more about what you just said, Rob? About people being here and gone? I don't know why I said that. I had a hunch about where she might go with this. I didn't want to have that conversation. Whenever she asked me anything too personal, I'd either ignore her or give short answers and she wouldn't push.

So, what I think is really interesting there is her comment, your comment, and then your analysis in between that. And then if you look at the punctuation here, we'll put it on the screen. She told the class it was sad, {comma} or {comma} like, {comma} tragic, {comma}. Yeah, yeah. So, even the punctuation is very different. With you, you can almost feel the the trepidation, the fits and the starts. And with her, it's a lot cleaner, it's more adultish, and you can really see the the personalities come out in the voice and the punctuation there.

Yeah. Yeah, I I I remember this. And and a lot of kids are like this, right? I was in that, you know, how old was I? 10 maybe, 11. You know, you're kind of in that awkward pre-pubescent phase of especially when you're interacting with adults, that uncertainty, that feeling of um self-consciousness of you want to be seen as mature, but you know you're this small little kid. And so yeah, I started with the sad and then switched to tragic because I wanted to tell her, you know, I I I I I can use this word, but it if I had started out with saying the teacher said it was tragic, that wouldn't have been that wouldn't have been true to the voice of a 10-year-old kid, but it is that moment of, okay, I'm remembering what the teacher said and I'm trying to, you know, look more adult-like to my therapist and so I switched from sad to tragic to communicate to her that I remember this. Um and yeah, right, she she comes off like

much more mature and she is very much that kind of the one with the um influence and the uh you know, the the sort of higher status in that interaction, right? She's the adult there, so. Right. And you were talking about calling your friend about throwing up in the Jack in the Box parking lot and talking to different people like your sister. What were those conversations like? Were they structured? Did you How forthright were you about what you were working on? What What made those work?

Um yeah, they they knew. I mean now I'm in this weird situation where like my high school friends will like text me like you popped up on my YouTube algorithm and it's like weird, you know, because You're telling a story about me. Yeah. Yeah, sometimes sometimes yeah. Now, my my sister has read the book cover to cover. I was very forthcoming with her up front as soon as I signed this book deal. I could tell she was a little uncomfortable with it and you know, but I sent her, you know, some of the chapters and the rough draft of the manuscript. And yeah, she I think she had a a difficult time at first for a lot of reasons. One was just I think she was unprepared for that first chapter where I'm talking about my experience in foster care.

And we're close. Like my sister and I were very close and I've never actually told her sort of beat by beat, here's everything that happened. You know, I kind of told her in broad strokes what it was like and she knows, but like it's there's a difference between knowing and then seeing sort of vividly the details. That was really hard on her. Um but no, I think she comes out looking pretty good. My mom had some difficulty with it, too, but she's she ultimately accepted that like this

this was a book that I had to write. Well, in the acknowledgements, it sounds like you had a conversation with J.D. Vance. What was that like? What did he teach you about writing memoirs? Yeah, so toward the end of the final chapter, I think it is, or the penultimate chapter, I describe how I had this op-ed that was placed in the New York Times and his his wife read it. So, Usha read that and emailed me and said she really enjoyed it. She sent it to J.D.

And then, yeah, we set up a phone call some weeks later. And by that point you know, literary agents were contacting me and I was thinking maybe I would possibly take on a book project. And yeah, J.D. basically told me, you know, don't don't rush into anything, take your time. Do you get along with these agents? What are their you know, does your vision align? Um he told me that your idea for what the book will be will almost certainly change once you get started.

That happened. Yes, that did. And and it was funny because we almost had the same trajectory. So, he told me that he wanted Hillbilly Elegy to be mostly sociological, like this kind of detached um almost academic work where he's describing the patterns and pathologies of Appalachia, the white working class, and so on. And he said, you know, but I would bring in some maybe some stories from my childhood to kind of illustrate the these broader points. But then eventually turn into the reverse where it became a very personal memoir, but he would bring in a you know, a bit of the sociological data and ethnography and so on.

I had the same experience where I wanted it to be more of a uh an analysis of class and social mobility and with some stories interspersed and then it became a very personal memoir. Why do you think that happens? So, I can't speak for J.D. I think for me, people but especially young men, I think are uncomfortable with personal narrative Mhm. for a lot of reasons. I think one is just again, it feels immodest. Like, is anyone really going to care about my personal story? Um that's that's one. And then maybe one layer deeper is I don't want to confront all those feelings and emotions and fears and vulnerabilities and bringing all of that out into the limelight.

And it was a very different kind of writing that I was not used to. I was unprepared for like what like the structure and the narrative that memoir demands of like you have to tell, you know, each each sort of vignette within a chapter has to be a story. Each chapter has to be a self-contained story and then each chapter has to be part of a broader story. And that was just way more demanding and exhausting than I anticipated and I didn't want to do that. I wanted it to be like I'm comfortable with this kind of academic style, this writing, this you know, references and footnotes and citations and that kind of thing, drawing on statistics and survey data.

But ultimately, um you know, what was the point of the book is to communicate to people what this is really like. Right. And there's there's a limit to abstractions and the kind of regimented methods of academics and scholars versus biographies and memoirs and stories, personal stories. They're just more immersive. And so, you know, however much the social sciences bring under their sway, however however detailed the accounts of historians and ethnographers, they're never going to fully capture kind of what everyday life is like for an actual human being, right? Like you can read about some historian's account of what Rome was like versus like actually reading a biography of someone like Caesar. It's much more immersive and it gives you a deeper feeling of what life was like at that time. And so, yeah, at a certain point I realized I had to I had to tell my personal story in order to make these broader points.

What did you learn from Tara Westover?

Yeah, I mean, Educated was a fantastic book. Um I mean, it was better than my book. Uh in terms of its quality and its style. I'm just like, that's maybe one of the best memoirs I've ever read. It is one of the best memoirs I've ever read. And I Yeah, I remember being intimidated a little when I spoke with her. Um but she turned out to be very nice. So, I've met her twice. I had a phone call with her and then she delivered a talk at Cambridge. So, she's a graduate of of Cambridge. She spoke at Magdalene College. One of the things she told me was kind of continuing on this point of personal narrative versus abstracted academic style writing, I asked her, you know, I don't know how to approach this. Should I tell my story or should I be more detached? And she says that if you bring in data and statistics in the middle of a story, you're going to lose the reader. And she told me, "You're going to" and she used this

term, I distinctly remember she said you're going to break the spell for the reader. Break the spell. Break the spell, yeah. And and I think that was perfect cuz if you read her book you are spellbound because her writing is so beautiful and so immersive. You know, at that point I'm thinking to myself, oh suddenly she's bringing in statistics about living in a survivalist commune or something. Yeah, it would have shaken me out of this immersive experience. So she told me you know, you really have to think about what you want to do. If it's going to be personal memory it has to be personal.

Um I didn't fully uh embrace that advice. There are periods where I do introduce statistics and exactly. But I tried to resist it. Uh and the other thing she told me that I found interesting and this is I've more or less found it to be true is you want to draw people and characters sufficiently so that the reader can kind of recognize their patterns. But you also want in order to sort of retain the reader's attention also point out um stories where they deviate from those patterns. So you expect a person to behave one way but then they surprise you and behave a different way. And so I remember that as I was trying to recall, okay, my friends, you know, they were very predictable in a lot of ways but my most unpredictable friend was Tyler where there are periods where you can't tell is he is he mostly a good guy? Does he just have this chip on his shoulder?

What kind of person is he? Uh so I tell the story in the book of how you know, he he just gave me money for gas. Just didn't even ask any questions. Pulled out 28 bucks, handed it to me and never asked me to pay him back. Um but then later he kicks this dog off a cliff and so there's you know, it's it's I tried to sort of introduce those moments of surprise both for other people but then also for myself. There were periods where you know, you're not necessarily entirely sure which way I'll go.

So, that was important, I think. And then, finally, she told me, um because she wrote a lot about her family in Educated, and I asked her "How hard was that for you, and how did you approach that?" And she said "The things that you think will possibly upset people won't. And the things that you think are completely innocuous and meaningless, those are the things that are going to get under people's skin." And I didn't really know what she meant by that, but then once I wrote the book and yeah, you know, that I mentioned earlier my sister, you know, and I sort of debating back and forth about was she 17, was she 18, a completely to me meaningless thing, but for her it meant something. Like the things that I thought might upset my mom, for example, telling all of these stories and everything. She was she was fine with it. Um yeah, it was very surprising.

Uh you know, the number of houses that that she and Shelly purchased. I think I remembered it being three in total. She insisted it was four. Those little things, right? But then when it comes to, you know, the drama in the parking lot or uh where we were when she told me that she was gay. Those those are the things where she's like, "Come on, you know, she needs me to Right. Yeah. So. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that those yeah, that was a very helpful those two

conversations I had with her. How'd you think about ending a memoir? What is important? I want to read your ending. Mom's friends were worried that their son isn't talking as much as other 6-year-olds. They, like many parents, were concerned with how smart their kid is. "Should we be reading to him more?" they asked me. I thought of how lonely I felt trying to teach myself how to read as a foster kid. "Yeah," I replied, "but not because it will expand his vocabulary.

Read to him because it will remind him that you love him. Mhm. Yeah, ending a memoir is weird because you're still alive, you know, your life is still going. Um I remember when I saw Tara speak at Cambridge a few years ago and she was about to deliver this talk based on her book and she made this joke but which at the time I didn't fully understand but I kind of understand now which was um you know, she was like basically saying like if you haven't read the book they're going to be kind of spoilers which is a weird thing to say about someone's actual life.

Right. Um and so yeah, there's this like there's an artifice to it of like taking real events and putting them in like this story format and so there has to be an ending even though like you know, as soon as I click you know, the the the final full stop period and then got up from my desk and life goes on and I'm still doing things. So how do I end it in a way that's satisfying, that's true to the themes of the book and yeah, for some reason um that story um stood out. It came to mind maybe because I had immersed myself in this book for so long and thought about its themes for so long and you know, somewhere in the back of my mind unconsciously I was searching for anecdotes or stories or something that would you know, conclude this in a satisfying way and that story just jumped out at me. And and it was one of the you know, it's it's funny like and and you're a writer so you know this where like

there's a lot of self-doubt, a lot of like is this actually how it Really? Oh, I never struggled with that. Yeah, a lot of it like just like you you're just plagued by this like does this even work? Am I like does it make sense to me? Is it going to make sense to other people? The ending was the like maybe the only time in this entire book Yes! I have the ending. I did it! And as soon as I wrote it like I so in my mind I'm like that's it but like let's see how it goes when I write it on the page and then I wrote it and I'm like, oh, oh, thank god I have it. Like oh, I have the ending. And then it was it. I was like and it was like, you know, just you know, kind of that lightning in a bottle.

Just completely good fortune finally struck me and it just happened to be at the end there where I had it. I had the right line. I had the right ending and and then I realized like as soon as I typed it I'm like, oh, that's it. This is

this book is done. At least like the rough draft of this book is done. Well, the one of the core ideas in the book is that elites place a lot of value on how much money you make Mhm. and how educated you are. Yeah. And what you're saying is, hold on. That's not nearly as important as coming from a good family and being loved and having stability. Mhm. That whole thesis is comprised in this final sentence. Mhm. But not talk about reading.

But not because it will expand his vocabulary. Read to him because it will remind him that you love him. Mhm. That's what I take from that. That the vocabulary, the expansion is all the money, all the education stuff. This is fundamentally about relationships and about love. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And that kid is going to you know, every kid in those you know, when they're being read to by their parents, they're not thinking, oh, this is going to help me to get into college or this is going to help me win the school spelling bee. You know, they're just thinking like I want my my mom or my dad or whoever to read to me.

And that's all it is. It doesn't it doesn't get much more sophisticated than that. And you know, from the adults perspective, especially highly educated people, their whole thing is like optimizing every decision to get their kid into college and it's funny. So, I sent an early version of the book to a friend of mine in in the UK and after he read it, he told me this this story. So, he and his brother both went to Oxford, kind of the British version of that sort of American striver culture thing and he was telling me how when he was growing up his parents, every single decision was optimized for like the the yes no binary. Is this going to help this kid get into Oxford?

Yes or no? Yes or no? Uh, you know, piano lessons, private tutors, whatever. And and they were successful in that. That like yes, both of the boys got into the school they wanted. Um, but now he tells me he has a very frosty relationship with his parents and he told me, you know, I can't help but wonder if maybe our childhood had been less about ambition and striving and more loving and more nurturing and maybe we wouldn't have gone to this fancy university, maybe we would have gone to, you know, a mid-tier place, but I'll bet I would be looking forward to Christmas a lot more had we been raised differently, you know, because of how cold and, you know, even as a kid, even if you don't consciously, even if you're not consciously aware that that's what your parents are doing, you can feel it. That they're doing this for this these instrumental calculated reasons and not necessarily because

um, they have your emotional security in in mind.

How did you think about writing the preface? Because the preface is really rooted in statistics. It is building off anecdotes and research papers, facts, and then you go right into, "Hey, here's young Rob." What's the point of a preface? What made that successful or not successful? That was really more of a compromise in some ways. So, Hm. when I sent those early chapters to my editors, they were basically saying that like, "Okay, you're jump, you know, you're you're kicking us right into the story, but like what does this all mean?

Why why should we care?" And I remembered Tara's advice. Like cuz they wanted me to bring in statistics and research and kind of intersperse in that first chapter and I resisted it. Um, and so the compromise was and and also because I know I don't know the actual statistics on this, but a lot of readers don't read prologues and prefaces and intro they just go straight to chapter one. And so I figured, okay, well Even me, I I saw it. I was like, do I want to 50/50? You know, I I was like, flip a coin. You know, I was like, heads the preface, all right, I'm going to read the preface.

Well, what a lot of readers do, and I do this sometimes, too, is I'll I'll jump to chapter one, start reading, maybe I'll just finish the book, and if I'm left wanting more, then I'll go back and read the preface. Um And so that was yeah, that was this was the compromise of okay, well, if if it's important for me to like establish myself as okay, I'm going to introduce the adult Rob, the way I think about the world now, the the perspective of the voice of experience.

I'll bring in the statistics. I'll tell you a you know, I'll give you like a a sort of taste of my life, and I use that device of introducing myself through my three names and the origins and my Right. Um parental figures, but then describe okay, well, I have these credentials and these degrees, these letters after my name, but this book isn't necessarily going to be about that. It's going to be about the name itself and the story behind it.

And yeah, I I bring in the statistics from James Heckman and other researchers indicating the importance of you know, if you're going to have children and you want them to be successful, there are at these predictors in place. And so that was basically it of sort of bracketing the story of okay, the preface and maybe the final two or three chapters are kind of research heavy. You know, the the those final three chapters is a it's a little bit of a blend of like personal story and statistics, but the preface is um more academically driven.

And that was basically to reassure the reader that like I'm not just some guy talking about my childhood, that there is a point to all of this, that I do um know what I'm talking about when it comes to child instability, not just from a personal perspective, but from an academic one as well. There's a lot of people who hate on academic writing. For good reason. Yeah, for good reason. But what have you taken from academic writing that you actually incorporated into this memoir and that you're like, "Wow, I'm really glad I know that."

Hmm. Okay. Uh You're like, "Man, I don't know." I got to say something nice about academic writing. Um You know, I Okay, academic writing generally does get a bad rap. Um and I think deservedly so, but I did sort of just through um you know, through through doing a PhD, you just learn how to do research pretty well um if you're in a good program. And so I knew, okay, if I wanted to find a piece of information, I knew um kind of where to go, how to find the right references, which which journals are reputable. How do you do this?

Break it down. Yeah, okay. I mean I mean, if you if you literally go in cold, like I just want to learn about um you know, the predictors of graduating college, you could just punch like keywords into Google Scholar. And then on Google Scholar itself, it'll tell you how frequently a paper's been cited, which is an imperfect but rough measure of like, do academics take this paper seriously or not? If it's been cited a lot, you can click on it, you can sort of skim the abstract and you know, depending on how deep in the weeds you want to go, you can go through the method methods and the results. But usually start with the abstract um and and then also the age of the paper, you know, cuz a lot of research it turns over very quickly. You you want to find the the the most fresh studies possible. And so then you start to Okay, you look at the author names.

Okay, um search the author names. Look at their academic webpages. Have they done anything more recent? Um what are their most recent papers? Who have they collaborated with? Look at their collaborators. See what they've worked on. And then you'll just sort of have this chain of associations based on a couple of papers from Google Scholar and then you can start to build a picture of okay, so here's this kind of body of work that's been done. Have there been any sort of review papers written maybe in the last 5 to 10 years that summarizes it because that can be a huge help versus just going to each individual study. Okay, I'm going to cite these eight studies versus citing this one review paper.

Um and usually when it comes to review papers, you're going to look for more established academics. So you can even do things like look at the age of the person. So if the person's still in a PhD program or a post-doc, most likely they're doing sort of fresh and original research, um which can be very helpful. But if you want that sort of deep dive review, look for senior scholars who have kind of stepped away from you know, being in the lab or doing doing sort of on the ground work and more sort of doing this kind of holistic summary of everything that's been done because they're senior and because they've been in the field for decades, they know themselves which papers are um useful and reliable and so on. Um and so that's that's sort of one way to do it.

And yeah, through that process I knew okay, these papers are valid and I have you know, I know I I just did this salon the other day with a bunch of psychologists online about this book, like academic psychologists. And um that was you know, weird like this book isn't for them, but I did you know, I'm I still have this PhD, I still have this feeling of like I I don't want to disappoint them and I want to do justice to the research, too.

Those status circles still matter. matter, yeah. And um you know, I was I was happy to say that like they did feel like this book was accurate, it was faithful to the research and that um yeah, yeah, there was only one who like quibbled with some minor you know, decisions, but overall um yeah, I haven't had any any um professor academic pushback on any of the broader claims that I've made. So, yeah, yeah, I I think it's helpful. And then also the other thing is and this is more just sort of um unrelated maybe to the specifics, but more so the the habits of writing. So, one thing a PhD teaches you is that you have to write every day because you a PhD thesis is essentially a book. And if you don't sit down every day and get those few hundred words down on the page, at the end of your four, five, six-year program, you're not going to you're not going to get your degree. Um and so, just building in that habit of every day

sit down and write. And so, that helped to sort of inculcate that in me that I got to write something, whatever it is, the 300 words, the two crappy pages a day, the you know, whatever the target word count is for that day and that week and that month, I have to meet it. And in some ways they're very similar, um a thesis and a book, uh because you also do a vomit draft for a PhD thesis as well. And you just give it that first pass and then later on go through and like check check your citations and your references and make sure that the language is appropriate and everything. Um so, yeah, I was sort of learning both of those things concurrently, but there's there is some overlap. The most important thing, like with anything, is just building that habit, sitting down and writing.

Right. It seems like something really important happened for you at the War Horse Writing Seminar Mhm. at Columbia. Yeah. And here's what you write. I wrote a rough draft of a personal essay reflecting on my upbringing, but didn't let anybody read it. Mhm. And the way that you write about it is that there was this sense of guardedness. It's like, oh my goodness, I can't have anyone can't have anybody read that. So, how do you go from that feeling, that fear, that closeness, to 300 whatever pages of a memoir?

I noticed both in my life and then in the process of writing the book that the guardedness was often self-defeating. This feeling of like I have to protect myself, I'm not going to tell anyone how I'm feeling or why I'm acting this way or what's going on inside me. And then that would sort of express itself through behaviors, through externalizing, through thrill-seeking, or other in forms of impulsivity. But then once I just started talking about it, that's when things slowly started to turn around for me.

Um you know, first First, I mean really, I kind of tried to communicate it through those interactions with Janet, where I often did feel better speaking with her. But the the period leading up to it was always dreadful. But then afterwards, I always felt better. And then in rehab, the same kind of thing. This kind of shame and embarrassment, this feeling of humiliation that I had to check into this treatment facility. But then once I started going and interacting and talking about my my feelings and my internal state, and my um you know, that sense of shame and all of those things, then I started to connect some dots and become more honest with myself about why I had lived my life the way that I had, and what I wanted for my future.

And then yeah. But but you know, it's it's one of the it's one of those things where like in in movies and in stories, there's always like, "Oh, and then you change overnight, and now you're this new person." It wasn't like that. Even by the time I got to Yale, I was kind of a different person than I was but in the military versus when I was in high school, but I still had that those lingering feelings of do I really want to talk about myself? Do I really want to bring this up? Do I really want to share my point of view?

Um it never goes away um completely. But I guess one This is only This is something I've only recently realized was there's also maybe This is something I'm wrestling with, this possibility that through being in these kinds of elite college environments, where people do love talking endlessly about their misfortunes, and their you know, how they're so beleaguered, and how tough their lives are, and so on. And it all just disgusted me when I saw it because so much of it felt artificial or performative.

And I want I wanted to resist it. Like, oh, that's what they're doing. I don't want to be part of that. But you know, at some point I realized, you know, if I wanted to communicate why it was so absurd what they were doing, I had to talk about my own experiences and say, well, this is how a lot of kids are living. This is how a lot of young people live their lives and it's very different from being in gated college, you know, gated residential college. So, um some of it may have just been sort of a reaction to what I was seeing uh on campus as well.

You're talking about the importance of hard work, of consistency, and you cite this paper about an insight bias in creativity. And that there's two ways to think about creativity. The first is you have this idea, it's like the muse is coming, boom, there we go. And then the other kind is a kind of persistence, day in and day out, day in and day out. And the paper that you reference says, "Hey, the day in and day out kind of creativity is actually extremely undervalued."

Yeah. Yeah, I I read that paper and it it captured a lot of my experience with writing where especially once I started a newsletter, um you know, I had to get something out on Sunday regardless of how good it was. That was kind of my task for myself. Because around that point I had made this decision that I wasn't going to be an academic and I wanted to start writing more for the public. And yeah, every day I or every yeah, every day I'd sit down and try to get something for the book, for the thesis, and then later for the newsletter. And it really is kind of this grind. I think a lot of people romanticize the creative process maybe a little too much where you think of, you know, like the the image of a writer is like, you know, Hemingway or Orwell in Paris with their cat and pipe. Yeah, the cafe and all of these brilliant insights are coming to them.

and croissant and I will write the great paragraph. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it just comes to them just through the process of being this writer. And really what creativity looks more like is just, you know, someone in like a, you know, their gym shorts or their bathrobe just like, Yeah. you know, struggling and getting down a million horrible ideas and, you know, launching the occasional good one and yeah, writing 50 newsletter posts and maybe 10 of them are actually sort of really worthwhile and stand the test of time.

But you just have to put in the reps, right? Like with anything else. And so, yeah, I think that that the persistence piece of the creativity puzzle I think is right that you know, maybe maybe there are a few very gifted people who, you know, great greatness and brilliance strikes them in the moment, but I think you have to just sort of be ready for that for it to strike you. And the way you do that is just by sitting down every day or every week or whatever it is and just starting to write. You often don't even know what you think until you start writing. And then maybe a little bit of that brilliance will will catch you.

As you were writing the memoir, did you have like, you know, on Netflix shows, there's the hook at the end of the episode and then after it goes like, "Previously on 24." Did you think about doing stuff like that in in Troubled? A little bit. I mean, there are a couple of chapters where there are like sort of very obvious cliffhangers where um, you know, I ended one of the chapters right after Shelly was shot. Uh, there was another chapter where um, I'm meeting the police at my sister's father's house.

Things like that. Um, it wasn't something I consciously set out to do, but as I was writing, I did notice, "Oh, that's that's the right point to end this and to bring them into the next chapter." So, not every chapter has those kinds of cliffhangers, but some of them do, and that just happened through the process of writing where I recognized, oh, that's a nice place to stop this and and then move on. But, overall, like the structure of the book in terms of the way that the chapters are laid out, those were set out in advance, more or less. I think it started out originally as 10 chapters and then it became 12, but more or less I knew, okay, this is going to be the chapter where I talk about foster care. This is going to be the chapter where I talk about the adoption. This is going to be the chapter where I'm living with my mom and Shelly. This is the, you know, military chapter, rehab chapter,

so on and so on. And that worked out pretty well, I think, to sort of capture each slice of my life. When you read memoirs now and you're like, this is an awful memoir, an awful memoir, like this thing just deserves to go right in the dumpster and be

lit on fire. What are the writers doing that now that you've written one, you know, and you wish that you could just be like, you need to know this then your memoir wouldn't be so terrible? I mean, you know, it is like it's like, you know, all the clichés are right. The show, don't tell. You know, I read some, you know, there was a bad memoir I read a while back where it was really just like the person talking about how cool he was and how good he was with women, but he never really like explained it or or illustrated it with an interaction, right? He just talked about it and and patted himself on the back.

And you know, that that's you know, I could write this book like, oh, I had a really tough childhood. I lived in foster homes, but that's very different from bringing the reader in and illustrating, okay, here's the memories, here the specifics. Um and so yeah, that's like a very obvious one, show, don't tell. Um yeah, I think the how vulnerable you're willing to be as well. Um you know, are you theme. Yeah. Don't write a memoir if you're not willing to Yeah.

really be vulnerable. Well, there's there's that kind of there's there's that problem between the author and the reader of a memoir because we all know that generally speaking people like to make themselves look good. Perhaps look better than they really are. And so you're going to go into a memoir a little bit suspicious, a little skeptical. How honest can this person really be? And I think at least in the the early chapters before the book if the book is any good and it grabs you those early chapters at least at first you're going to be like, "Okay, well, is this person being truthful? Does this feel right? Are they giving a better account of themselves than uh than is believable?" And so yeah, I I have my kind of um guard up I think or my Yeah, exactly. I kind of monitor for that as I'm reading memoirs now. And I think you can usually tell in the first chapter how honest someone is being especially you can see

this with uh with bad memoirs where they start badmouthing someone else almost right away. Um It's like a hit piece. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Where they're trying to uh settle grudges. A lot of people try to do that. I uh I had this conversation with with Tucker Max. Um and he I think him in the acknowledgements, too, where he talks about What is it? Writing from your scars not from your wounds. Mhm. You know, where you're writing from Yeah, maybe you have these sources of pain um but they've more or less healed. They've left a mark, but you've you've sort of moved beyond it, but you're writing about how you got those and writing from your wounds in contrast is you still feel hurt, you still feel resentful, you still feel like the person who did this is still um you know, you still want to condemn them and blame them in some way. And so you start trying to like settle that grudge through your writing.

And that I think comes out and people can be very blind to So some memoirs can be very blind to the fact that that's what they're doing. Write from your scars not your wounds. That's a That's a good one-liner. Yeah. Well, you reference this quote from George Orwell, which says, "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful." Disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life, when viewed from the inside, is simply a series of defeats.

Yeah. Yeah, I came across that quote very early in the process. Like I said, I was trying to research and how to write a memoir, getting pieces of advice from other authors, articles, and so on. And I've always been a fan of fan of Orwell. I read 1984 and Animal Farm in high school and read a bunch, you know, I I still read his essays and still try to um you know, i- identify um value from from George Orwell. And yeah, that quote struck me, man, and it plagued me all throughout the writing process. That lingering idea in my mind like, you know, am I giving a an honest account of myself? Am I looking too good? And then that that idea of like, any life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats, it's so true.

That's so true. Well, well, well, you said something interesting like, am I telling the truth? Yeah. Am I making myself look good? But what really resonates about that is that your own internal perception of your life is like, Yeah, yeah. And like, a lot of truth is speaking to the cognitive experience of those defeats over and over and over. Yeah. Yeah, and it it feels that way. I mean, you know, the when I look back on my life, I I remember the defeats, the setbacks, the obstacles, the pain. It It's It looms so much larger than a lot of the successes and the accomplishments.

And you know, some readers have written me and they've they've they've noticed this where I go into detail in terms of the setbacks and the obstacles and the difficulties, but then later in the final couple of chapters when things start to improve in my life, I kind of gloss over it, right? Like I spend quite a bit of time like my my process of getting into Yale and that experience. In part because I wanted to communicate to the reader like if you if you're the first person in your family to go to college, it it is an obstacle course. Like how do I put an application together? How do I like how do I take the SAT? Those kinds of things.

And and then later I get into Cambridge and I just gloss over it. But get like a PhD application is at least as difficult in many ways as a bachelor's application for a selective college, but I'm just you know, for me it's once I got into Yale, my life was set and I don't really think of those memories as being quite as important and critical to my life as those earlier memories. But yeah, some readers did tell me like, well, you told us how to get into college. I want to know how to get into a PhD. I'm like, to me it's just not nearly as as interesting or important because Orwell was right. You don't really view your life in that way. You view them as these series of defeats,

setbacks, difficulties. Focus on those things. Exactly, yeah. If I'm the chancellor of Yale, I'll give you a call and say, "Hey Rob, we really want to do a seminar on writing memoirs next semester. How do you structure the curriculum? What are the core things you've got to teach that the students really need to know?" Oh man. I mean, we would focus on mining your own history, your own past, what has happened to you, um understanding that memoir is not as I mentioned, a loose heap of anecdotes, just this you know, this happened, this happened, this happened.

Identifying those most vivid memories. What are the memories that make you feel something? What are the memories that have lingered with you? What are the memories that you're ashamed of? What are the memories that you're proud of? And yeah, getting getting those down on the page um in a way that is truthful to the story. Accepting I think to some extent whenever we tell stories about ourselves, there's always that element of being an unreliable narrator because, you know, we don't have footage of everything that happened. It's not uh you know, a perfect testimony. You know, you're not writing uh the Warren Commission report. You're writing your own life and there's going to be Right.

blanks and and and details that escape your memory. So, you're just going to have to accept that in advance. Um And yeah, we would I think we would focus a little bit on sort of narrative structure and storytelling in general that for better or worse, right? You can't just tell a series of anecdotes. They have to center around a theme. They have to communicate something. And that's the difference between memoir and autobiography. Autobiography is kind of beginning and end with all of the details filled out in between, dates and towns and specifics. And no one wants to read a person's autobiography unless you're Winston Churchill or some Ben Franklin Yeah, exactly. Some iconic larger-than-life figure or celebrity.

But if you're an ordinary person who's maybe lived a little bit of an unusual or extraordinary life, you got to write a memoir. And memoir is centered on themes and underlying motives and universal um topics that anyone can relate to. On that question, were there any moments when you felt, "Ah, no one's going to be able to relate to this. Ah, the total addressable market for this idea is too small." I felt that the entire time.

Really? Yeah, yeah. Because so, I'm writing this book and I'm thinking like as a writer, like so no one knows anything about foster care. Is anyone really going to connect to this story at all? Because it's so outside of people's purview, um so outside of like, you know, most people haven't been in foster care, most people haven't been in the military, most people haven't been to some, you know, expensive college. So, are these like how People can't relate to anything.

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking as I was going through it of like, okay, I'm going to tell the reader what it's like, but are they going to care? It's outside of their area of of interest, perhaps. But then I found, and this is maybe um you know, maybe this is just some accent or cliche too, that idea of the more personal something is the more universal. Those experiences in foster care, being adopted, this working-class town that I grew up in, all of these little interactions, in isolation maybe they're not especially interesting, but taken all together, um, in the aggregate, a lot of readers did get something from it.

Even if they don't necessarily remember the specifics of the story, they do it does bring up feelings for them or it reminds them of their own lives, and that's something that surprised me, too, is that even readers who did come from relatively, in terms of material uh, abundance, yeah, they came from maybe upper-middle-class families, but you know, someone in their family experienced addiction or there was some kind of abuse or some family tragedy or secret or something.

I'm reading a story about you. You're, I don't know, maybe four or six years old. Yeah. And then I start mapping that onto my own experience. Yes. Yeah. And then I start thinking about my own life. Mhm. And by walking through those years with you, it gives me a prism into memories that I had forgotten from my own life. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right, that once you once you read about someone else's life and it's vulnerable and um, and vivid enough, naturally you'll start to think about yourself and your own memories and um, you know, in a lot of ways there's this kind of a coming-of-age story, so a lot of young people will write me and they're sort of at that point in their life where they're wondering what they're going to do next and I'm telling these stories of being a teenager and being uncertain and being scared and not knowing where I'm going to go, but that is the story of a lot of young

people, a lot of teenagers. Maybe not quite to in the same sort of degree of severity or or precarity, but still, you know, when you're 18, you have to do something with your life. What do you do next? And this is that kind of story. Yeah. Well, Rob, congrats on the memoir. Thank you. Just all the work that went into this, all the emotional toil. That's really what stuck with me here, the emotional toil of of doing something like this and great to have you on the show.

Thanks, David. We're talking about the craft of writing here and one thing I've noticed is that in the world of food, so much of what I read is overdone and overwritten. I think of cookbooks, I think of elaborate descriptions on bougie restaurant menus and I don't know about you, but all that has deceived me into thinking that writing about food has to be complex in order for it to be successful. But I've come to realize that's just not true.

You don't need fancy language to write about food. Common language works just fine. And for an example, I want to look at John Steinbeck and his book, his masterpiece, East of Eden. And as I read this paragraph, I want you to notice the simplicity of the language here, okay? It goes like this. The apple pie was golden and fragrant. It's crust delicately browned and sugar crusted with the faintest hint of cinnamon wafting up. The apples inside were tender, but not mushy. Each bite offered a balance of sweet and tart that made my mouth water.

The warmth of the pie coupled with a scoop of melting vanilla ice cream made each mouthful a little piece of heaven, evoking memories of long and lazy autumn afternoons. First of all, that is beautiful writing. And second of all, I'm hungry. I want that apple pie. Because this paragraph is alive, isn't it? And the words are so simple. There's nothing pretentious. There's nothing pretentious about it. But what's going on here? Let's break it down. Steinbeck's description comes alive because it's so layered. What he's doing is he's appealing to multiple senses. There's sight, there's smell, there's touch, there's taste. There's all four. And you can see the golden, the delicately browned and sugar crusted crust. You can see it. You can practically touch the warm pie, the scoop of melting vanilla ice cream.

And then, you can taste the faint scent of cinnamon that's wafting up, the tender, but not so mushy apples. You can taste all of that. And it's the collection of these very descriptions, the diversity that he has going on here. That's what's giving this paragraph life. And then, there's the pacing. Steinbeck wants you to linger on the details. He wants you to slow down and savor the paragraph with the same kind of presence that you'd bring to a delicious slice of apple pie.

And I want to look at how he does that with structure and with punctuation. So, we look at this paragraph. There's three sentences. And the whole paragraph is a single, fluid, continuous thought that goes from top to bottom. Every sentence, roughly the same length. And what does that do? Is it gives every sentence equal weighting. There's no one place that he really wants you to focus. Within those three sentences, there's a total of seven commas. And what those are doing is they're just serving as gentle pauses. Gentle pauses. Gentle pauses. Because Steinbeck is asking you as the reader to just slow down and feel the deliberate and unhurried pace that he's describing right here when he's talking about these long and lazy autumn afternoons. He just wants you to peace out, relax. It's sort of like being on a hammock, you know?

And then finally, there's the sequencing, which pulls you into the intimacy of the moment. It's like a slow zoom in shot in a film, where he's starting from far away and just moving closer and closer and closer and closer, adding suspense to the moment. How's he doing that? He's going from eye to mouth to mind. So, how can you apply this to your writing? Well, if there's one takeaway I want you to remember, it's this. There's no need to show off with super duper fancy $100 words. You don't have to do that. You can have an uncommon effect on your reader by using common language to describe a common experience, just like Steinbeck. And I do a writing example like this every single week. If you want to check them all out, go to writingexamples.com.

And when you get there, you can enter your email right at the top of the page, and if you do, I'll just send you an email whenever I publish one. So, about once a week, and then you can just learn all about the craft of writing.