It is easy to find good reporting and commentary on the US student debt crisis, but there has been little writing that captures how the crisis feels for those living through it: the way debt threatens relationships, health, and people’s hopes for the future. Kristin Collier’s new book, What Debt Demands: Family, Betrayal, and Precarity in a Broken System, steps in to fill this gap.

On its face, What Debt Demands is a memoir of the author’s rather particular and extreme experience with debt. In 2008, as she sat in a bank office applying for her first credit card, Collier learned that her mother had stolen her identity, taken out an enormous amount of student loans in her name, and left her with over $200,000 in debt. This is the book’s opening. What follows, however, is not so much a family drama as a social one.

In Collier’s hands, the unreal, sudden, fantastical feel of her debt becomes not just a private affliction but a symbol for the multiplying zeroes and hemmed-in futures that shape the lives of the vast majority of American college students. By blending history, cultural criticism, and interviews with other debtors into her own story of navigating a predatory loan system, Collier captures the experience of debt in its felt totality, writing a memoir that manages to tell the story of an entire oppressive system and what we need to do to overcome it.