The character you created, Tina Fontana, is sort of a modern-day Robin Hood. But she also does a really unethical thing — and yet I can't help but root for her. Why is that?

"I wanted to make it kind of vague, in terms of the morality. The opportunity comes to her by mistake — it falls into her lap. It’s very hard to put a face on it and to really say anybody is going to be hurt by her taking the money and using it to pay off her debt. It was the equivalent to if an ATM spit out too much money. And are you going to feel sorry for Chase? I mean, I wouldn’t.

"Still — you might still feel guilty because of some moral code. But I wanted it to be a situation in which a good person with good, solid, morals might still understand why she did it. And of course, you want her to do it when she's debating, because there's a real 'what if?' fantasy there."

Do you think that rooting for Tina says something about where we're at as a culture right now?

"My goal when I was writing the book was that it would ultimately spark conversation about living in a country, as we do right now, [where] hardworking young women who often do have student loan debt, who tried to make all the right decisions, [now find ourselves] in this situation.

"There’s something about the American dream that is broken right now. Look at this election cycle. Look at what we’re talking about: inequality, this new gilded age, this unprecedented inequality in terms of wealth. So what’s fair? What’s fair when you think about government sanctioned inequality — when secretaries are paying more in taxes than the CEOs they work for who are billionaires. It gets very gray."

What do you hope readers will take away from reading this book?

"One thing that's interesting about student debt for undergraduates is that we are so young when we make that decision: Our frontal lobes aren’t fully formed yet when we’re signing our lives away. I just want to contribute to this conversation. The book is entertainment — I’m not making any political claims in it. But I want it to be a gift — a treat — for all of the other women who were in similar positions to what I was in, when I felt so very frustrated‚ to mirror back in a way that wasn't tragic, and even optimistic.