03 Dec 2025

Leaving home / Coming back

Laurie Woolever’s bureaucratic burden; enjoying a family trip with John Saward

Photo illustration. Images: Federal Student Aid and PS5 motherboard by Fritzchens Fritz from Berlin via Wikipedia

Today: Laurie Woolever, author of Appetites, World Travel, Bourdain: the Definitive Oral Biography, and Care and Feeding; and John Saward, a writer based in Chicago.

Issue No. 455

FAFSA Is Breaking Me
Laurie Woolever

Home for the Holiday
John Saward

FAFSA Is Breaking Me

Laurie Woolever

I think I have been holding it together in the face of everything we can’t stop talking about—the killing and the dying, the explosions and the terror, the eggs and the bird flu and the shameless ghouls ruining the good parts of our country, the weapons and the drugs, the viruses—and also the fucking cockroaches in my apartment that cannot be killed, only subdued. I have a teenager, a suddenly frail elderly parent, and a shaky bank balance; I have bad feet and bad knees and am living in the knowledge that I am supposed to have already cooked up a new book proposal by now, before my relevance and marketability collapse, despite having had a best-seller featured on the cover of the book review just seven months ago.

Relative to many, my life is very good, in that I am alive and housed, fed, sometimes employed. I am healthy and loved. Still, I am about to lose my entire mind over the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) website, and the fact that someone, probably a bot farmer, has already used my 16-year-old son’s identity to establish a fraudulent account. This is a common scam, one that was fortunately detected before any money changed hands, and we have submitted the necessary documents to prove that he is him. The problem has been fixed, they told us, go ahead and clear your cookies and change browsers and restart your machine and log in, but still, it does not work, it will not work for us, my teenager cannot use the internet to ask the federal government for a… loan? A grant? I don’t really know, I haven’t done my homework on this.

Small child wearing colorful tie dye shirt, in an alley regarding a white-painted brick wall featuring an eight-foot high painting of an ogre

I am terrified of debt on my son’s behalf, half-trying to talk him out of his ambitions, trying to keep him geographically close in some New York City community college (wouldn’t that be nice, to come home and do your laundry?) I am wandering around Duane Reade, looking for zinc tablets to battle a nascent head cold when he calls, asking for extra money, for the Clemson application.