What Debt Demands
Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System
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What Debt Demands
Buy Now for $30.02
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Narrated by:
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Mia Hutchinson Shaw
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By:
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Kristin Collier
About this listen
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. But to her shock, she learned 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?
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.
Critic Reviews
“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"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