Credit card debt explored by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh in new short story

In Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s fictional novel, “Minimum payment due“, the main character is trapped credit card debt and desperate for a way out.

The fact that the experience is common – more than a third, or 38%, of adults in the United States have credit card the debt, according to Bankrate – does not make it less scary for the narrator.

Collection agents won’t stop calling. Meanwhile, he can’t even admit how much he owes his therapist.

“He waited while I calculated the figure in my head, the different principals, the late fees, the penalties, the surcharges,” writes Sayrafiezadeh. “So I did what everyone does when they are consumed with denial and shame: I rounded down and lowballed the figure. The lowball was still a lot.”

The narrator turns to self-help books, therapy and even a cult for advice, but it’s too deep. No matter how much you drive toward debt each month, it won’t go down.

Sayrafiezadeh is a fiction writer, memoirist, and playwright living in New York City. CNBC interviewed Sayrafiezadeh this month about his story, which appeared in the New Yorker in November, and his choice to use fiction to discover credit card debt.

Annie Nova: You never tell us exactly how much the narrator owes in credit card debt. I’m curious, what was the point of that omission?

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh: It’s like with Jaws: You don’t want to show the monster too much. I think it would be better for the reader to ask himself, and to create a picture in his mind, rather than to give a hard number.

AN: You say the debt is going from “four figures to five”. So we know that much. But that could be $10,000, and that could be $99,000.

SS: That’s exactly right.

AN: In the story, you mention that the compound interest is increasing every day on your credit card debt. We have a feeling that the character will never be able to get out of it. It is described in a really scary and vivid way. I was wondering if credit card debt was something you dealt with.

SS: I am really the opposite of this man. I don’t even wait for my statement to pay. Knowing that I owe nothing to anyone, there is a pleasure for me in that.

AN: Did you do any research on credit card debt for this story?

SS: No, I don’t. I just put myself in the position of someone who was in this situation. I guess I just have to feel it. Maybe we’ve all felt it, in some way. Even if you’re not in debt, it’s still there, lying around. What if I can’t pay my bills? Maybe something in 2008 when we had the Great Recession, and everyone was losing their homes. I do not know. It just didn’t seem difficult to imagine what it would be like to be this character.

AN: In the opening scenes of the story, the narrator receives a call. It turns out to be an old friend, but he is convinced first that he is someone else called by a collection agent. Is credit card debt so consuming for the narrator that he can’t see anything else?

SS: Yes, absolutely. Everything you see, you see through the colored glasses of debt. Everything is his debt.

AN: The only person in the story the narrator confides in is his therapist. But even to him, he lies, saying that he owes less than he really does. Why can’t he tell the truth?

SS: There is a certain shame that carries with it. Maybe there’s some denial about that, too. Telling the actual amount to the therapist makes it real, and it’s not something he can really face.

AN: I thought it was a really interesting detail that the narrator is a software engineer at a technology start-up. He is in debt even though he presumably has a good, well-paying job. Why add these details about him?

SS: I wanted to be on the algorithms that operate on him, and on us, in our society. It says something about how Tony Robbins’ book appears in his Instagram feed. There are these algorithms that target us with advertisements that we are susceptible to. But I also wanted to make him someone who creates these kinds of algorithms, so that he is a part of this cycle. I wanted to have the irony of him writing code, but also susceptible to the code he writes.

AN: So how does this character end up with so much credit card debt? Is it a spending problem?

SS: It’s a good question: Why is he in debt? The only thing it says is that it is susceptible. So that’s all he knows. And that’s not really an answer. But what it means is that it is vulnerable; is vulnerable to being prey. The story doesn’t really get to the root causes of why he operates the way he does. I wanted it to be more of a mystery. He does not know why he is who he is, why he has come to all this, with all this debt.

AN: Do you think your story will make people feel a little less alone with their debt?

SS: That would be great. I try to write about some things that are disturbing and that plague a lonely character. But yeah, the story might make someone feel like, Oh yeah, this isn’t just me. Maybe that’s how the story ends, with readers not feeling alone.