At the time of this writing, my student loan debt from law school sits well above six figures. As distressing as it can sometimes feel, my situation is far from uncommon. More than 43 million Americans collectively own $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. Currently, 5.3 million borrowers are in default, and about 63 percent of borrowers have experienced difficulty making their student loan payments at some point. 

In this context, The Payback doesn’t just feel timely—it feels urgent. The novel follows  Jada Williams, a former Hollywood stylist now working a minimum-wage job at a mall. Like many Americans, Jada has a mountain of student debt, and she faces a relentless pursuit by the so-called Debt Police to pay them back. After being fired from her job at the mall, Jada and two other debt-ridden coworkers join forces to take down the system that failed them. Together, they scheme to erase their loans and exact revenge on the institutions that trapped them. The Payback is more than a revenge fantasy—it’s a deeply felt meditation on the crushing weight of debt, the absurdities of capitalism, and the radical potential of solidarity.

I spoke with Cauley about absurdism, retail work, and the importance of collective action. 

Marisa Wright: In your debut novel, The Survivalists, your main character, Aretha, is burdened by significant student loan debt from law school, and debt of course plays a central role in The Payback. As a lawyer with substantial student loans myself, I can certainly relate—but I’m curious: What draws you to explore student loan debt in your work? Why is it a theme you return to?

Kashana Cauley: When I was in law school, I hung out with the not-rich kids—the kids who also had debt—and we would talk about it all the time. We were taking out an amount in debt that was shaping our career. An amount that was deciding what we would do in the future and how much money we wanted to make. I know a ton of people who came into law school with one set of goals and then got those loan numbers back and changed to a second set of goals. 

This was at Columbia, and New York is expensive, so we were all looking at maybe $250,000 in loans when we graduated if we didn’t have any sort of financial aid. I also graduated at a weird time, a couple of years before the 2008 financial crash. Being from a generation of people who were encouraged to take out money for loans to get an education and prove themselves and then were thrown into an economy where the ability to pay it off was not guaranteed at all, that was traumatic. It was traumatic to me and traumatic to all those friends I’m talking about. And I’ve never gotten over that at some level. 

MW: This novel balances absurdity and humor with heavier topics like death and overwhelming debt, and in a previous interview, you said, “I consider the modern American experiment…to be absurdist.” Given that we’re already living in absurd times (can’t disagree with you there!), what does dialing up that absurdity even further allow you to do that realism does not? 

KC: Yes, student loans are a serious topic, but to be honest, they’re also absurd. Somebody just makes up a number somewhere, and then they saddle you with it, and then that’s 30 years of your life. Absurdism is just another way to tell the story. There are serious people out there, but I like punch lines. I feel that sometimes people listen to me more when I’m funny,  and I appreciate that. I think this would be a much different, much sadder, possibly harder book to read if everybody was just sitting there depressed about the amounts of their loans. Sometimes when you’re laughing, you pay more attention. And so I guess I would like to trick people. 

MW: Relatedly, one of the more absurdist elements in this book is the debt police—an organization whose violence feels disturbingly real, especially against Black women, as you write about, yet they’re also oddly obsessed with horoscopes and crystals. What inspired that combination? 

KC: I will probably always be inspired by the fact that I grew up in an anti-vax household. My brother is autistic, and my mom and her friends all got together to read and pass back and forth “scientific” papers with some absolutely insane alternative treatments. I’m so glad none of them actually used them on their children, but I wanted to write about it. 

MW: That’s interesting, you’re sort of bringing both of those threads in American life together. 

KC: Yeah, some of that is the failure of our healthcare system. I’m not saying I agree with these folks, but I’m saying when you go to the doctor, and you’re not taken seriously, you go to the internet, and the internet will cough up any number of solutions. We could produce a healthier country by encouraging doctors and nurses to really listen to folks, to talk to them about medicine, and to spend time with people’s questions. 

MW: Absolutely. On another note, I find that some of the most successful novels ground their characters in very specific jobs that shape the narrative in meaningful ways. Here, your main characters work in retail, and you capture that environment with specificity and careful attention. You’ve previously discussed working at J.C. Penney—why did you choose that setting, and how would you describe retail work informing the characters’ ultimate paths in the story? 

KC: Working in retail is quite common but also underexplored in novels. Adele Waldman had a big box retail novel last year, [Help Wanted], but it’s just not that common. I worked at J.C. Penney for six years, and it was an odd time for me. I was attempting to use that money to fund my college expenses that weren’t covered, so it was a real love-hate thing. I loved the girls I worked with. We were in the trenches together. It was terrible, but we were together. We dealt with all the quiet indignities of working at retail wages together. We were each other’s support systems, and so I knew I wanted to write from that emotional core. What if all these girls who work in retail get along? And what if they find their way to a friendship? How close could they get? What would they be willing to do for each other? 

MW: There are moments where the narrative subtly educates readers about the realities of student loan debt—for instance, highlighting how Black women carry the highest debt burdens with fewer resources to repay them, and how universities contribute to pressuring students into taking on debt. How intentional was it for you to include these insights, and how do you see the role of fiction in challenging these systemic injustices?

KC: That actually sort of relates to your last question because one of the things I talked about with my retail girls was money. We all talked about how much we were making and how much we made in commission. We all talked about how expensive college was or wasn’t. The conversations in the book are actually fairly realistic extrapolations of what those sorts of financial conversations, as well as the ones I had with my law school classmates, were like. 

I think there are a lot of spaces in American life where money is discussed quite openly and straightforwardly. It’s the rich who don’t love talking about money openly. In one sense, I think it comes across as educating the reader, but I think in another sense, it’s faithful to the way that the working class discusses money, which is upfront, in great detail, and with helpful advice. 

MW: The heist to erase all student loan debt at the center of this book is a sort of fun, slightly preposterous thing to imagine. At the same time, there appears to be something deeper at play with the idea of collective action or mutual aid. Beyond the humor and spectacle, did you have ideas about the power—or even necessity—of collective action on your mind as you were writing this book? 

KC: For a long time, I have been studying efforts to attempt to address medical debt and student debt. Most of what’s happening is on the collective side. Right now, the Debt Collective, who buy up and forgive people’s debt, comes to mind. To me, the real movement on these problems has been in collective action, and I wanted to honor that by having the book come from that perspective. 

To Joe Biden’s credit, he attempted to address student debt and cancel certain borrowers’ student debts over and over again, but he got rebuffed by the courts over and over again. It’s hard to get things through Congress. It’s actually easier to help ourselves. We shouldn’t have to do all this for each other, but we know what we need. We listen to each other more so than Congress. 

The Black community has a very long tradition of taking care of ourselves. It’s always been collective action with us—from helping each other get out of slavery and escape lynchings in the South to all the Civil Rights things people read about in textbooks or hear about every February.

We talk, and we help each other out. People in Montgomery just wanted to be able to ride the bus and sit in the same place as everybody else, so they got together with a group of friends and did that. The book is an honor and a tribute to those sorts of collective action traditions that are uniquely American.