I disagree, your book (and NYTM excerpt) do not detail the trials and tribulations of a "typical" subprime borrower.

You describe people who thought they deserved more than they earned. If you felt your child support and alimony payments were so "onerous", why did you agree to them? Was it because you couldn't get out of your marriage fast enough to think straight? How awful for your children to read, someday, about how much you bitched about having to pay that amount for their support.

How awful to know that at the time you pitched your book and sold it for a six figure advance, you agreed that your wife should file for bankruptcy under her name alone, based on her lack of an income, until a creditor forced her to include your income. How laughable her representations of "value" for her assets. Seriously, you bought her a $500 wedding ring? Really?

How many mutual bills (prior to your marriage) were crammed into that 2007 bankruptcy? And, really, was there was no other recourse to repaying her sister than to file bankruptcy so that her sister received nothing in settlement?

I not only question you on moral grounds, but on ethical grounds as well.

The only way in which your situation resembles a "typical" subprime borrower is in the minority of cases who feels entitled to more than their income alllows.

I do know of a few people who got caught up in subprime hell by being unsophisticated borrowers who crashed because the economy killed their jobs and ability to pay their mortgages and other bills. I've been in their homes during the Christmas Holidays when their children got nearly nothing because there was no money and the parents didn't want to take on any more debt, but you and your blended family do not fit that model.

You are far more like the cheats who lived beyond their means for years banking on home appreciation until the bubble popped. I read your NYTM excerpt and all I felt was disgust and a need to slap you both into adulthood. You have seven children depending on you and you acted as though you were uneducated fools with double digit IQ's.

"I was in love" equates to a self involved mid-life crisis without considering your children or current spouses well-being. It's navel gazing at it's worst and now you hope that you can flog this book long enough, with the help of your media friends, to make enough money to continue the charade for a few more years.

It's beyond time to sit down and take a good hard honest look into the mirror and confront what you see there.

Don't dismiss or trivialize the bankruptcies or the constant overspending (how is it possible you're $50k in credit card debt AGAIN, two years after your wife discharged $26K in miscellaneous debt and approximately 2-3 years after you refinanced and took out enough money to pay off the rest of your credit card debt?)

Please do not blame "everyone" for this crisis, there's a big reason why you have been so heavily critisized. So far, it's a minority of mortgage holders who have defaulted. There's a whole real world out there of renters who pay their bills and mortgage holders who pay their mortgage and don't run up their credit cards to cover living expenses. They cut back on expenses when their income doesn't cover current spending, but I guess you don't know about that and just hope you can sell this fabrication of honesty to dig yourself out of the hole you put yourself into.

"the goal is to explore in intimate detail the broader corruption and cynical recklessness that infected players at each level of the financial food chain."

Really? That would have been a good thing to do as an reporter for the New York Times while it was happening. I'll bet you would have won some sort of award for that!

It seems to me now the goal is really to peddle your book, which will add little to our understanding of the crisis, by now "exposed" pretty thoroughly. No one is reading this for your economic insight (if you had any, you would have..um...) Instead, it gives a schadenfreude thrill for all of us who behaved like grownups and bought houses we could afford. I know I enjoyed the Times Magazine excerpt-- and all the McArdle pillorying. Of course, I'm not going to spend a dime for the book. Perhaps I'll get it from the public library.

But I've got to hand it to you, you're willing to go on the TPM and be heckled and abused. So perhaps you deserve a few coins for all the joy you've brought to those who restrained their sense of self-entitlement.

In the debate between Mr. Andrews and his critics, indeed in the debate over whether borrowers or lenders are more to blame for this mess, I think many people are assuming that living beyond one's means is easily avoidable for everyone.

It is obviously not a good idea to bet on housing prices appreciating, and to assume that one will be able to pay back a loan based on capital gains caused by a bubble. Especially if the loan is large relative to your worth, thus making you that much more vulnerable to the disaster if the housing market collapses. But the same people who are most vulnerable, most tempted to do this, are also the ones with the greatest need. They are the ones being killed by rising health care costs, increases in gasoline prices. They are the ones who can't afford to send their kids to college. They are the ones paying more than rich people for the same things. More money, more time, more hassle. Higher interest rates.

Even more generally, the common indictment of American economic behavior -- our low savings rate of the past couple of decades, our reliance on credit -- must be viewed through the lens of declining purchasing power and stagnant household incomes. If you read the paper and see housing prices going up, and you can borrow against your house to pay the bills that seem to be accumulating for necessities, it would seem foolish not to do so. That decision proves in hindsight to have been unwise, but shouldn't reflect on your character as sincere and hardworking.

Ned Balzer makes an important point: people falsely assume that it's easy for most people live within their means.
One big reason that household debt shot up and savings rates plunged was that real family incomes stagnated between 2000 and 2007. Meanwhile, of course, housing prices had been climbing about 40 percent faster than the rate of inflation ever since the 1990's. Finally, banks made a major push to market both credit cards and subprime mortgages to lower-income people. Poor people became the Next Big Thing.
Which brings me to this point: I am sick and tired of people who moralize about financially irresponsible borrowers as if they were scum of the earth.
I'm not trying to make excuses for my own decisions. I put myself out there as a case study for the mortgage meltdown, so throw as many stones at me as you like.
But this crisis occurred because millions of American homebuyers went over the cliff at the same time. Aside maybe from ranters like Bullsh*t, does anybody think all those people suddenly lost their sense of personal responsibility?
Wall Street developed an insatiable hunger for high-yielding loans to risky borrowers. And Ellen is right: Washington under Bush was thrilled to help out in any way it could.
Moralizing about people like me may be fun, but it isn't enlightening. Defaulting homeowners come in all sizes and colors. Some were true victims, like the El Salvadoran couple who put down $72,000 of their own money and unwittingly took out a "1 percent" Option Arm to buy a $720,000 McMansion in Virginia. Others were just nuts, like the real estate agent and his wife in southern California who bought a $3 million palace with an Option ARM and are now begging for a loan modification.
But the one thing they all have in common is the financial system, which became a machine to market, rationalize, sanitize and re-sell loans that people couldn't afford.
At the end of the day, I don't for a minute believe that most defaulting homeowners were especially bacchanalian. We're talking about houses, mostly suburban houses, not yachts or cocaine.
I cannot tell you how many earnest people have poured out their hearts to me about their mistakes. They kick themselves for borrowing too much, for not understanding their mortgage or for believing that home prices would keep soaring.
By contrast, I have yet to interview a bank executive or an investment banker, a Wall Street lawyer or a bank exec who admits he personally did anything wrong.
I admit this is partly personal. It hurts to be attacked. But until I hear Stan O'Neill or Chuck Prince or somebody from AIG apologize for their recklessness, I don't think borrowers should be start apologizing for theirs.

Frankly, I saw the excerpt in the NYT magazine, and I was absolutely transfixed. Sneaked away from family breakfast to read it undisturbed. Continue with the righteous blaming if you must, but I recommend the book. I thought it was a really interesting read, in a train wreck sort of way.

Well, if yuo liked the Magazine excerpt, you'll love the book.