by JULIET WATERS

Save Karyn: One Shopaholic’s Journey to Debt and Back reminded me of a true story told by my friend Sasha, our sex-advice columnist. Years ago, during a rough spot, she received a cutoff notice from Bell giving her a week to come up with $400. She scrounged together the money, but then saw the most gorgeous pair of boots on sale—a steal at $400. When she called Bell she could have pulled out the standard sob story, but instead she managed to convince the woman at accounts just how great these boots really were. The cutoff threat was cancelled and they worked out a payment plan.

The moral of this story is not that honesty works. A lie might have worked too, but it wouldn’t have made a very good story. What works is charm, the kind of healthy, honest, disarming charm that makes the woman at the accounts office feel like another woman, not a welfare worker. The kind of charm that helped Karyn Bosnak get out of a $20,000 (U.S.) debt in less than six months.

Bosnak was not the first person to come up with the idea of Web site panhandling, or the last, but she’s the only person who managed to pull it off successfully. Her site, Savekaryn.com, scored her a book deal, and if you’re not bothered by the kind of flat writing that makes this the literary equivalent of reality TV, this is a surprisingly fun read.

Instead of Bridget Jones’s lists of cigarettes consumed and pounds lost and gained, each chapter of Save Karyn opens with copies of her credit card statements from May 2000 to January 2002. These are dark mementos of a terrifying but common nightmare. An average Midwest girl scores a big six-figure job in New York City and racks up over 20 grand in credit card debt in under a year.

Bosnak soon starts to burn out, however, as a producer of trash-talk TV shows like Curtis Court. The allure of acting and looking like a character from Sex and the City faded fast as the reality of being a slave to New York started to set in. Buying $800 worth of lingerie in one afternoon no longer seemed to make up for the fact that her job consisted of coming up with ideas like booking emergency-room nurse Darva Conger as an expert medical witness. Bosnak walked away from a job she couldn’t stomach anymore. Unfortunately, it was a time when jobs weren’t easy to find, and she was soon living in a rat-infested apartment in Brooklyn and bouncing cheques at the Food Emporium.

Savekaryn.com started as a psychological exercise in self-parody to cheer herself up. Framed as an infomercial where all she was selling was good karma, she told her story, auctioned her stuff and documented the ways she was coming up with to save money on her “Daily Buck” page.

Response was mixed to say the least. Bosnak got her fair share of hate mail, along with the kindness of strangers, but word spread quickly and widely. She was soon fielding interviews from all over the world. Glamour U.K. wrote a positive feature, Glamour U.S. called her a “Glamour Don’t”. The New York Times chose her Web site as one of the best ideas of 2002, while parodies popped up all over the Net. When The Smoking Gun blew her anonymous identity she was free to start doing the Today Show, and that’s when the money started really rolling in.

It’s been a year since Bosnak’s been out of debt, but she still maintains her Web site, keeps us up to date on the antics of her cat, Elvis, and updates the “daily buck” page. Just the other day while on her L.A. book tour, she saw a Stroke (she’s not sure which one) in first class, and saved money by watching the free in-flight movie, which she might otherwise have rented.

Save Karyn by Karyn Bosnak, Perennial, PB, 443PP, $13.95