I'm Alan Alda and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating. I took out the maximum amount of loans every semester.

And I used the loans mainly to cover living expenses.

After I graduated, I went home and took off my gown and everything

and just felt so guilty for going to college, just because I knew the student loan payments were going to

because I knew the student loan payments were going to kick in in six months or so

and I was really going to struggle with that for the rest of my life and

so it was never something that I felt entitled to or that I even deserved just because it was so extravagant.

That's Stephanie Land.

And while that student alone may have seemed frighteningly extravagant for a single mother struggling to survive while cleaning houses,

it paid off in ways she could never have dreamed of.

It paved the way to a book that became a bad one. in ways she could never have dreamed of.

It paved the way to a book that became a bestseller,

then to a television series with tens of millions of viewers.

The book was made, hard work, low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive.

Stephanie Land now has a new book out today that tells in gripping detail the backstory of Made,

What Her Life Has Been Like since the book and TV series, and

it lays out a devastating case for the need to reform the tattered social safety net.

I'm really looking Hatter Social Safety Net.

I'm really looking forward to this because your writing is not only so brilliant, but the first book you wrote,

made, became such a phenomenon of communication in this country, explaining

one group of us to another.

And that's so powerful.

...