I talked to Grisham about the world of for-profit law school, his writing and reading habits, and his future plans. A warning: Our conversation includes some spoilers about the book’s plot, so proceed with caution. The transcript below has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Alana Semuels: I know you’ve said you read “The Law-School Scam” article in The Atlantic, and that inspired you. What about the article caught your eye and made you think, “This will be a good novel?”

John Grisham: A couple things. First of all, I was not aware of for-profit law schools. So that was a surprise. I really haven’t spent much time thinking about the student-debt crisis, and that was sort of an eye opener. Just the whole idea of these schools charging far too much in tuition simply because the students can borrow too much, and providing education that’s not that good to students who are not that qualified. It’s a disaster. I was really inspired by the article to dig deeper. And that’s what I did. The deeper I dug, the better the story got.

Semuels: When you say “dig deeper,” how did you do that?

Grisham: Primarily through online stuff. There’re lots of blogs written by students who are really frustrated with the system—law students and dropouts, kids who owe a fortune. There’s a bunch of blogs and websites about student debt. And when you read the blogs and you see how severe the problem is for some students, it’s pretty easy to put together a story.

Semuels: How did you then take that information and turn it into fiction? Were these characters that came naturally out of your research, or had you conjured them up before you started thinking about for-profit law schools?

Grisham: Oftentimes an idea for a novel will kind of rattle around for a long time. For example I’ve been thinking about the issue of mass incarceration, and I’ve been thinking about the issue of the opioid crisis. And when I do that, some of the characters develop along with the story. This was entirely different because this was just one moment—when I read the story, then I said, “This is the beginning of something.” The characters were all brand new, and they were all totally fictional. I wanted three third-year students who were heavily in debt and deeply frustrated, and looking for a way out.

Semuels: There’s an argument out there that people who knowingly signed up for law school and took out loans are not sympathetic because they should have known what they were getting into. What do you make of that perspective?

Grisham: Well, I guess we all believe you’re accountable for your actions, and these were students who were adults who, by the time they’d finished college and started law school, knew what they were getting into. They signed the paperwork and they knew they were going to owe the money, as opposed to some 19-year-old who might not fully appreciate the aftershocks and long-term problems of borrowing a lot of money to go to college. But they were also being misled by the law schools into believing that they could handle that much debt with a nice job. And it’s simply a scam, a scam so that the law schools can profit off of the indebtedness. So, yeah, as the novel progressed, Zola especially kept saying, “Look, we signed up for this. Nobody made us borrow this money.” And in the end they do the right thing and pay off their debts.