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What Debt Demands
Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System
Description
A powerful memoir of a woman plunged into fraudulent debt that explores America’s broken student loan system and illuminates the ways that debt shapes every aspect of our lives.
At 22 years old, Kristin Collier was on the verge of college graduation, applying for a credit card to cover expenses before her teaching career began. She handed the banker her social security number and birthdate, excited to embark on her adult life. But the man returned, unsmiling and holding a lengthy copy of her credit report. He told her in no uncertain terms that she didn’t qualify for even the lowest line of credit. In fact, she had a shocking amount of debt already: a handful of credit card debts and dozens of private student loans, which she’d known nothing about. In total, she owed over $200,000. How could this have happened? She struggled to breathe.
WHAT DEBT DEMANDS is a nuanced and poignant meditation on indebtedness and its consequences. Kristin paints a vivid portrait of her own experience with personal debt, navigating the complex student lending system alongside her evolving relationship with the person who stole from her, a family member she loved and trusted. Weaving in interviews with student borrowers, historical analysis, cultural critique, and research into the higher education system, she reveals debt’s profound impact on every aspect of our lives, our relationships, and our world. As Kristin explores how and why our nation arrived here and what it will take to heal her own financial and familial wounds, WHAT DEBT DEMANDS illuminates the unjust world that already exists and points to a better one: a world where all students, regardless of race or wealth, can access free education. And one in which we are not bound to the state but to each other.
At 22 years old, Kristin Collier was on the verge of college graduation, applying for a credit card to cover expenses before her teaching career began. She handed the banker her social security number and birthdate, excited to embark on her adult life. But the man returned, unsmiling and holding a lengthy copy of her credit report. He told her in no uncertain terms that she didn’t qualify for even the lowest line of credit. In fact, she had a shocking amount of debt already: a handful of credit card debts and dozens of private student loans, which she’d known nothing about. In total, she owed over $200,000. How could this have happened? She struggled to breathe.
WHAT DEBT DEMANDS is a nuanced and poignant meditation on indebtedness and its consequences. Kristin paints a vivid portrait of her own experience with personal debt, navigating the complex student lending system alongside her evolving relationship with the person who stole from her, a family member she loved and trusted. Weaving in interviews with student borrowers, historical analysis, cultural critique, and research into the higher education system, she reveals debt’s profound impact on every aspect of our lives, our relationships, and our world. As Kristin explores how and why our nation arrived here and what it will take to heal her own financial and familial wounds, WHAT DEBT DEMANDS illuminates the unjust world that already exists and points to a better one: a world where all students, regardless of race or wealth, can access free education. And one in which we are not bound to the state but to each other.
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Praise
“What Debt Demands is an exceptional account of American borrowing. Collier’s memoir of her own life and debt, much of which was obtained by her mother fraudulently in her name, is akin to existentialist literature, absorbing and dark. Her societal analysis is rigorous, as is her forceful reframing of debt, including how it is often created by the best things we do, like caregiving for our loved ones or mutual aid. Reading it will change how you understand what we owe.”
—Alissa Quart, author of Bootstrapped and Squeezed, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
"A deeply affecting book about the strangling infrastructure of U.S. American debt, and the barbaric toll it takes on the body, the family, the human spirit, and one's ability to plan for--or even imagine--a future. Everyone must read this book."
—Lauren Markham, author of A Map of Future Ruins and The Far Away Brothers
"A gripping memoir of a miles-long swim through the freezing ocean of student debt, Collier's story will resonate with anyone who's been made to fear the collector's call."
—Malcolm Harris, bestselling author of What's Left
"In the extraordinary debut What Debt Demands, Kristin Collier does for debt what Eula Biss did for vaccines in On Immunity—incisively peels back the layers of something both everyday and opaque, showing the inextricability of our bodies from our systems, and finding new language for a future of collective action and care. As gorgeously lyrical as it is deeply researched, this book is a gift to America: it should be required reading for everyone here.”
—Erica Berry, award-winning author Wolfish
"More than any other book I’ve read, Kristin Collier’s What Debt Demands details, at a level of intimate granularity, the ways in which debt circumscribes the lives of those it encloses. Whether a debt is “deserved” or not, its tentacles stretch across relationships, professional ambitions, and the debtor’s very sense of self, rendering those in its grip helpless to pursue rich and meaningful lives. With exquisite, devastating clarity, Collier lays bare the mechanisms that allow American capitalism to collapse the individual into a set of financial relationships that almost never resolve in her favor."
—Ryann Liebenthal, author of Burdened
"Kristin Collier’s clear-sighted recounting of her own devastating story of debt shines a bright light into the darkest and most personal corners of our unjust systems and enlarges our understanding of how money and class work in the U.S. As Americans struggle with new financial hardships, there couldn’t be a better moment to read Collier’s powerful and important argument for a different way of doing things. I learned so much from this beautiful and honest work—it’s absolutely gripping. Pick this book up for your friends, for your children, for your parents, for your wallet, and for your heart, which will be in your throat from beginning to end."
—V. V. Ganeshananthan, award-winning author of Brotherless Night