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In Saeed Seyrafizadeh's imaginative short story, “Minimum payment due“, the main character is trapped Credit card debt And desperate for a way out.
The fact is that this experience is common: more than a third, or 38%, of adults in the United States have had it credit card Religion, according to Pankrit, does not make it any less terrifying for the narrator.
Collection agents won't stop calling him. At the same time, he can't even admit how much he owes him Psychotherapist.
“He waited while I counted the number in my head, the different principles, the late fees, the fines, the surcharges,” Serafizadeh writes. “Then I did what everyone does when they're engaged in denial and shame: I rounded the number down and I lowered the number. And the low ball was still a lot.”
The narrator turns to self-help books, therapy, and even worship for advice, but he is very in-depth. No matter how much money he puts toward debt each month, it won't go down.
Seyrafi Zadeh is a fiction writer, memoirist, and playwright living in New York City. CNBC interviewed Serafizadeh this month about his story, which appeared in… The New Yorker In November, he chose to use imagination to explore credit card debt.
Annie Nova: You never tell us how much credit card debt the narrator owes. I'm curious, what's the point of this omission?
Saeed Serafizadeh: It's like Jaws: you don't want to show the monster too much. I thought it would be better for the reader to question that, and create a number in their mind, rather than be given a hard number.
A: You say debt has gone from “four figures to five.” So we know that much. But that could be $10,000, it could be $99,000.
ss: This is absolutely true.
AN: I mentioned in the story that compound interest was growing daily on his credit card debt. We feel like the character will never be able to get out of this. It's described in a really creepy and vivid way. I wondered if credit card debt was something I dealt with.
ss: I'm actually the opposite of this guy. I don't wait for my statement to pay the amount. Knowing that I don't owe anyone anything, there's a joy for me in that.
A: Did you research credit card debt for this story?
ss: No, I didn't. I put myself in the position of the person who was in that situation. I guess I should just feel it. Maybe we all feel that way, in some way. Even if you're not in debt, it's always there, swirling. What if I can't pay my bills? Maybe it has to do with 2008 when we had the Great Recession, and everyone was losing their homes. I don't know. It doesn't seem hard to imagine what this character would be like.
AN: In the opening scenes of the story, the narrator receives a call. It turns out to be an old friend, but he's initially convinced it's another call from a collection agent. Is credit card debt so consuming the narrator that he can't see anything else?
ss: Yes, of course. Everything he sees, he sees through debt-tinted glasses. Everything is his religion.
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A: The only person in the story that the narrator trusts about his debts is his therapist. But even for him, he lies, saying he owes less than he actually does. Why can't he tell the truth?
ss: There's a certain amount of shame he carries with him. There's probably also some denial about this as well. Telling the wizard the actual amount would make it real, and that's not something he could really face.
AN: I thought it was a really interesting detail that the narrator is a software engineer at a tech startup. He is in debt even though he supposedly has a good, well-paid job. Why add these details about him?
ss: I wanted it to be about the algorithms that work on it, on us, in our society. It says something about how Tony Robbins' book showed up on his Instagram feed. There are these algorithms that target us with ads that we are vulnerable to. But I also wanted to make him someone who creates these kind of algorithms, so that he can be part of this cycle. I wanted to capture the irony of him writing the code, but also being vulnerable to the code he writes.
AN: So how does this character find herself with so much credit card debt? Is it a spending problem?
ss: This is a great question: Why is he in debt? The only thing he says is that he is injury prone. So that's all he knows. And that's not really an answer. But what it means is that it is weak. It is vulnerable to predation. The story doesn't really get to the root causes of why he acts this way. I wanted it to be more mysterious. He doesn't know why he is who he is, why it has come to this, with all this debt.
AN: Do you think your story will make people feel less alone with their debt?
ss: That would be great. I try to write about some of the disturbing things that happen to a lonely person. But yeah, the story can make someone feel like, oh yeah, that's just not me. Maybe this is how the story ends, where readers don't feel so alone.
