Born in 1986, Madeline Pendleton came of job-seeking age, along with her millennial cohort, just as the Great Recession was shredding the world economy.

She was used to living on the edge. Her father, she tells Kirkus Reviews by telephone from her California home, was a part-time drug dealer, part-time bar bouncer, and part-time whatever work he could pick up. Her mother worked for minimum wage at an art-supply store. “I learned two entirely different ideologies about money from them,” she says. “My mother was a nose-to-the-grindstone, we’ll-get-by kind of person, but my dad said, ‘Spend it while it’s there, because it soon won’t be.’”

Pendleton took the former course, as she writes in her new book, I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had To Learn About Money (Doubleday, Jan. 16). She slogged. She endured sorrow when, as she recounts near the opening of the book, her lover, a decade older than she, committed suicide in the depths of despair over his poverty. Recalls Pendleton, “I experienced it as a very individual, personal thing, and it wasn’t until I started learning more about suicide that I realized that it was not an individual experience. He was unfortunately part of this statistic, of this trend, where many middle-aged men were driven to these deaths of despair, and a lot of it had to do with money. It’s interesting, being a punk rock feminist, knowing that the world is horrible to women, but you look at that and you see that the patriarchy intersects with capitalism in ways that adversely affect men, too.”

Pendleton took her mother’s example and worked, among other jobs, for a photographer who cheated her out of a significant portion of her pay. The experience was infuriating, made better only because she soon landed another job as an assistant to a woman photographer who was nothing but encouraging. Still, Pendleton says, it rankled. “There I was in my late 20s,” she recalls, “and I was really stressed out about money. There’s got to be a better way to be living, I thought. Everything I’m doing is wrong, and I want to know why.”

She took a deep dive into the chaotic world of financial advice, where no two people seem to agree on much of anything, especially when it comes to younger people who don’t have much to spend or invest. “None of it was quite right,” she says. “None of it quite applied to me or my life or what I wanted to do.”

And thus, in a whirlwind of relentless spreadsheeting and tracking every cent, I Survived Capitalism was born. “The whole time that I was doing this, I just kept [wishing] there was some sort of financial resource from somebody I could trust. And it just seemed like all those financial experts, they were older, right? But they came from a world that didn’t seem to exist for me.”

What existed for her was disgust at capitalism. Pendleton, at 28, was barely subsisting in Los Angeles on less than $2,000 a month, saddled with $65,000 in student loans. Her rent accounted for about half her income, far beyond what most financial advisers counsel is a healthy percentage but frequently necessary for her and her cohort. She did without many comforts in order to pay off her loan, month by bitter month. She put the punk ethos to work by appropriating an abandoned van and hotwiring it into service. And after coming to the conclusion that she was going to face hard reality and live to tell the tale, she returned with some unhappy observations: “Remember that your co-workers are not your friends.” “The goal is not perfection. The goal is survival.” “Right away, remember that you should never care more than your boss does.”

Those realizations shaped her book, a blend of often blunt advice on handling finances and a memoir of hard times. “I wanted to read a book about money that made sense to me, but it just did not exist in the market,” she recalls. So did the people around her, and when she set to work, she was determined to be as honest as she could be about her experiences. “I’m telling you about my life, my qualifications, so you know whether or not you can trust me. You have to know when someone is conning you to pad their own pockets or when someone’s saying, ‘I genuinely care about people, and here’s what I learned, and I want you to be OK.’ That’s me.”

Pendleton’s advice isn’t the sort you’ll find in the typical financial self-help book. She believes, for instance, that home ownership is essential—but only because “we live in a hypercapitalist society where there’s no safety net, and your home is your only asset. Instead of renting, it makes sense to take that same amount of money you would be spending anyway to keep a roof over your head and put it into an asset that’s going to appreciate in value.” That’s especially true, she notes, in a place like Los Angeles, where rent can easily exceed mortgage payments. But since most younger people can’t afford to pull together a down payment on their own, an anticapitalist hack is in order: “I had to get creative with it, and so some friends and I went in together and purchased one property with multiple units on it, kind of like making your own condo. My share of the down payment to purchase this way was $7,500, and the average going rent at the same time for a one-bedroom apartment where I lived was $2,500 a month. The goal that capitalism seems to have is making us all a nation of renters, which only serves to benefit the people with the massive real estate portfolios, and this was our answer.”

Asked if she’s angry about the financial precarity she and her peers face, Pendleton reflects before replying. “Anger is the first step,” she says. “You look at the world and you go, This isn’t fair, this is bad, this is hurting people, and you get mad. But you need that anger to channel yourself into something productive, something geared toward change. Anger and optimism go hand in hand, and to build a better future, you have to acknowledge that there are things in the present that need fixing.” Or, as she puts it in the book, “Feel joy as an act of resistance. Be happy despite all the bullshit.”

Indeed, anger is an energy, as the eminent punk rocker John Lydon observed. I Survived Capitalism is an energetic, encouraging manifesto for socially conscious financial self-care. Meanwhile, Pendleton is pondering what might be next. She’s received many requests for a budget cookbook, “Which is funny,” she says, “because I do not fancy myself much of a cook.” But given the unexpected turns that her life has taken so far, she concedes with a laugh that it could well happen. “The next thing you know, maybe you’ll see me on the Food Network, and I’ll have a whole new career as some sort of weird lentil-bean-rice chef.” Stay tuned.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.