Kay Pigeon's daughter, Leenie, got student loans to attend film school in LA. That was supposed to make her life sublime. Instead it condemned her to debt after she graduated into the 2008 recession and a job in the food service industry.
Leenie's loan, which Kay co-signed, and the Wall Street trade paper she writes for are making her life miserable. That paper, Securities International News, or SIN, is collapsing as Kay struggles with journalism's transition from print to the internet. The time is 2011, the place is New York City. Kay is the novel's first-person narrator.
While Leenie is in California waiting on tables, the phone in Kay's apartment rings every day with calls from the Pennsylvania loan servicer. Most are from call center rep Doris Morris. The payments, which Kay is responsible for, are being applied to the wrong loan and she can't find out why. Kay gets no help from the peevish Doris, until she decides to dish about corruption at the loan servicer. It's Kay's opportunity to write an expose—which may lead to another job—while getting to the bottom of her own problem.
Doris moves from Pennsylvania to New York and, by accident, joins Kay's gym across the street from the newspaper. Kay is in the office on a Saturday when Doris calls Kay and asks if she wants to work out. After the fit and ripped Kay meets the chubby Doris, she decides that she wants to avoid her. Kay isn't being judgmental about Doris's weight. Seeing the person who harassed her over the phone for the better part of a year is disorienting. Finding Doris at her gym is even more disorienting. Kay wants to talk to her, just not at the gym.
Kay's plans are thwarted when she and Doris end up in the same group workout, where Doris throws up. The workout stops. Afterward Kay finds Doris being attacked in the shower and intervenes. They go to a bar, where Doris discusses loan servicing; her story has insider info but many gaps, foreshadowing her as a mysterious character. The more she reveals, the more mysterious she becomes. Before Doris leaves the bar, she offers to introduce Kay to some of her former co-workers who are visiting from Pennsylvania. Kay sees this as an unexpected opportunity to move the story forward.
Five call center reps visit Doris the next day and con Kay into driving to Atlantic City on a gambling junket. While they revel in the power they have over borrowers, they're low-wage workers who are as exploited as the people they collect from—except for Doris. Kay learns how Doris thinks she's avoided their fate, then Doris wants Kay to unlearn what she finds out. At first, Kay thinks Doris holds the solution to her student loan problem, then she symbolizes why that problem is insoluble--for herself and many others.
The book is, among other things, a meditation on debt, symbolized by Kay, Doris and other characters who populate the book. The student loan Kay co-signed, represents one kind of debt. The debt she owes her editor, who has an Alzheimer's diagnosis, represents another kind, one Kay can't repay.
