Here we pick up right where Chapter 4 left off, with our debtors having set up a meeting with a Personal Insolvency Practitioner (PIP) to discuss their options and see if insolvency is the right choice for them. Initial contact with these experts was described using terms like ‘icy’ or ‘standoffish’, and there is confusion on the part of debtors over how insolvency works and what they are expected to do. Debtors expect a tedious process of form filling and means testing, but the reality is that success depends on a small number of micro-interactions mediated in the form of a confession. The debtor must use moral storytelling to tell the tale of their indebtedness; in doing so, they must convince the PIP and later their creditors that they are sincerely apologetic, that they take responsibility for what went wrong, and they must demonstrate that they have made a commitment to change.

This is a classed and gendered process, and middle-class men with strong access to social and cultural capital are best able to navigate the confessional interviews that determine whether one will be allowed to proceed. Workingclass debtors are framed through discourses of addiction and vice, and in need of ‘tough love’, which will lead to painful but necessary behavioural change. It is vital that the debtor is able to advocate for themselves in this process, something that my working-class participants struggled with. They must be contrite and apologetic by accurately relating their failures and sins, while simultaneously positioning themselves as deserving of help and compassion by outlining their purgatorial suffering.

Women, by contrast, are often stereotyped as addicted to consumerism and their over-indebtedness is therefore caused by an excess of leisure debt. While immensely frustrating, many women have found that by repositioning themselves and their situations as a result of caring debts (for example, loans taken to pay for childcare), they can use misogynistic assumptions to their advantage. By shifting their confessional story from consumerist spending on shoes and makeup to caring spending on children (affirming popular gendered discourses about women and childrearing), they can create sympathy which can open up a path to insolvency.