The first time I visited New York, in 2014, I was still on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. I stopped to visit the 9/11 memorial. It was under construction and heavily guarded by NYPD officers to prevent entry, but I wanted to see it. The friend with me, a Yale graduate who had tutored me in the Warrior-Scholar Project (a pivotal moment in my life) said, “Rob, I’ll bet if you show them your military ID, they’ll let you through.” I was skeptical but approached one of the cops. The officer carefully examined my ID, spoke a few words into his radio to notify his supervisor, and let me through. I spent 15 quiet minutes alone at the site, absorbing the gravity of what it represented.
I moved constantly when I was young. No single location holds all the memories of my youth; no old apartment preserves the spirit of the ten families I lived with throughout my turbulent childhood. What I have instead are fragments: a foster home here, a dusty provincial town there, and the echo of a restless ambition that kept me moving forward. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed something intriguing: people who fled California during the Covid lockdowns and resettled in places like Austin, Nashville, or Miami rarely returned to the Golden State. In contrast, most of those who left New York eventually found their way back. For me, as a millennial of a certain age—one who grew up amid the shock of 9/11 and loved the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies—this city feels like the culmination of something I’ve been working toward for years.
New York isn’t like anywhere else. Its energy, electric and chaotic, surpasses that of any city that I’ve been to in the world. To a boy growing up in foster homes in California, New York might as well have been another planet. I remember watching The Apprentice as a kid and hearing the host and future president announce that it was “where the American Dream was born.” For most people around the world—even for most Americans—the city seems like a movie set. To live here, as I do now, is surreal.
I say this as someone who has spent a good portion of my adult life living abroad—most recently, six years in the United Kingdom, four of those completing my Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge, followed by two more on a visa. I’m glad to be returning to the land of the free—or at least, the land where you can’t get arrested for social-media posts.
In high school, I had two jobs—as a dishwasher and a grocery bagger. When I arrived at Yale at age 25 with the support of the GI Bill, the only blue thing about me was my collar. I’ve lived many lives to get to this point, from actual poverty as a child to the genteel academic poverty of a graduate student, scraping by while writing my doctoral thesis and my book, Troubled.
New York, despite its outward chaos, offers a sense of continuity and permanence, in a way that no place from my childhood ever did. It’s a city for visionaries, for those who see opportunities and seize them, or stumble into them. I’ve had more than my share of biographical quirks—enough to leave me acutely aware of how quickly fortunes can change. In my youth, a throbbing rage consumed me: ambition and self-loathing, sorrow and shame, melancholy and despair. That rage drove me, even as it threatened to destroy me.
But here, in New York, that old anger is a distant memory. Nothing about this city reminds me of those darker days.
Throughout the process of writing Troubled, I came to realize that memoir is about squeezing the reality you’ve experienced into the vocabulary you know. It’s imperfect, always. Our lives are a beguiling mix of facts and feelings, images and impressions, memories and myths. What I know is this: I’m here now, in the greatest city in the world, writing, working, dreaming, and building a life I once only imagined.
Photo by Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
