After Kashana Cauley earned her first television writing gig on the Hulu animated series The Great North, her media friends in New York were thrilled, in a jealous kind of way. “You did it!” they told her. “You made it out—you’re in a stable profession!” Cauley began her professional career in antitrust law, then built a following on Twitter that caught the attention of editors and producers who liked her pithy observations about race and gender. She grabbed bylines in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Esquire before landing a staff writing gig on the Daily Show With Trevor Noah. But Great North, a sitcom job, seemed like the start of a more stable career in Hollywood. And it was: The show ran for five seasons. Networks and streamers all wanted content—until they didn’t. “There is so much less TV on the air than there was, say, five or six years ago,” she told me.
Professional instability isn’t new for Cauley, and it’s at the heart of her second novel, The Payback, which published this week. The book’s main character is Jada, who is very good at her retail job that doesn’t pay her enough to make ends meet. Like Jada, Cauley worked a retail job too: six years at JCPenney. She was the first person in her family to go to college and wanted to pay her way through. She knew that going back to Madison, Wisconsin, where she was raised, to work on the General Motors assembly line like her dad was no longer an option. The closest plant closed in 2009. The money she earned at JCPenney was nowhere near what she really needed, and without anyone to help navigate the maze of college majors and white collar career prep, she landed in law school. She graduated with her law degree—and six figures of student loan debt.
As Hollywood pulled back on TV production, war broke out in Ukraine. Cauley watched it all. She was fascinated with ethical hacking, the idea that small bands of Robinhood-minded techies could help even life’s uneven playing fields. She looked into zero-day hacks, which exploit gaps in software security systems, often of large private or government institutions. She thought about the people she had met across her many careers: the wardrobe folks at the Daily Show, the costume designers in late night television, the interns at Kenneth Cole. What might a revolution look like if it were led by the fashionable creatives of the world?
“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 solutions to these big societal issues.”
In The Payback, Jada leads a trio of down-on-their-luck retail workers in a fight against the fictitious Debt Police. It’s Cauley’s second work of speculative fiction; her first book, The Survivalists, followed another woman’s perilous journey up the corporate ladder. Her new book is an action-packed thriller for everyone who’s fed up with our current political situation. “What if we looked beyond the realm of what’s happening and toward the future of possibilities?” she asks. “In this era, that’s a good place to put your head.”
I recently talked with Cauley about living with debt, leaving Twitter, and finding humor in dark times. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired The Payback‘s Debt Police?
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 at JCPenney to help pay for college and law school. These days, how do you actually afford to be a writer?
I have a very financially and emotionally supportive husband. I ended up paying off my loans with TV money, but I don’t think you should have to win the lottery—which is basically what I did—to better yourself.
My husband is my support, along with my book advances, but I have definitely had periods where I’ve been the top earner in my house. It’s hard to think of a stable industry in American culture right now. We’ve all got to learn how to roll and take the punches.
A lot of folks first encountered your work via your hilarious social media presence. Why did you decide to leave Twitter and embrace Bluesky?
I was cutting down on my time there for most of 2023 after they changed the algorithm and I stopped getting responses and seeing my friends. We had an unsatisfying group of social media sites that rose up in the interim. Bluesky is the first that really feels like a place where a lot of people have joined and stayed. They post and they hang out, and I see a lot of the people I used to see on Twitter.
“I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth’s group chat. I feel left out.”
I’m sad about that transition. Twitter was a great place to hang out. Every once in a while, there were, like, missing Black people, and we found them! I don’t know if we’re gonna be able to find missing Black people again.
Who are the funniest Black women who inspire your writing?
I am an enormous Danzy Senna fan. She is so funny and is a really good observer of contemporary Black life. She wrote a book called New People, where one of her characters works on a dissertation about Jonestown. I didn’t know it was a thing where older Black women from the South, largely, were trying to find their way to equality through singing and alternative religion. All these people born in, like, 1915 in Alabama and they end up with Jim Jones drinking the Kool-Aid in Guyana. I was crushed.
I also got to work with Dulcé Sloan on The Great North, and she’s just fabulous—great energy, great vibe. And then everybody cites Fran Ross, who wrote Oreo. She tears your chest open and goes right to the heart of the joke. I love her for that. She was basically the only woman in the Richard Pryor Show writers’ room. Comedy is still trying to work out its relationship with women. She was not afraid of swinging. I love Black women like that. They are my idols.
What’s the importance of humor in this political moment?
Sometimes I cannot listen to things being told seriously. I need a new angle. Humor shakes me out of the constant depression that is the news and our politics. I live in LA, where we’ve had the National Guard in town for a few weeks, and it’s terrifying. You can’t live life on sheer terror. You will have a panic attack and die.
I mean, the Defense Department is taking the Blackness out of Jackie Robinson’s biography. The fact that he broke the color barrier was why he is on the dod’s history page. It’s important to be able to make fun of some of these folks in our public life. There’s a lot of incompetence there. I am the only person in America who is not on Pete Hegseth’s group chat. I feel left out.
Back in the day, I volunteered for Howard Dean and then the Obama campaign. I called swing voters in Ohio back when that was less terrifying. I did Kamala [Harris] stuff, too. I understand that things are sad and they’re bad, but humor is how I get people to listen to me. I’m tricking folks.
