“YOU CAN’T LIVE LIFE ON SHEER TERROR”

Author, TV writer, and social media wit Kashana Cauley on living with debt, leaving Twitter, and finding humor in dark times

- JAMILAH KING

In addition to writing for television, you're an author of farcical speculative fiction. In your new novel, The Payback, the protagonist, Jada, leads a trio of down-on-their-luck retail workers in a fight against the fictitious Debt Police, leading to a madcap heist. What inspired this malevolent enforcement agency?

I compare it to the Department of Education, which has been really enforce-y lately. All of a sudden, they can garnish wages, they can yank your driver's license if you're not paying back your student loans. In America, if you have financial problems, there isn't a ton of infrastructure to help you solve them. You are forced to come up with your own individualistic solutions to these big societal issues. I drew up three girls who were just like, “We are all we have.”

On top of that, it was important for me to include some Debt Police who were Black, because there are plenty of Black people who have bought into ideas of policing and enforcement—it's an American value.

You fought those battles yourself, working for six years at JCPenney to help pay for college and law school. These days, how do you actually afford to be a writer?