She and her partner John have recently bought a house, and she's now sure how she feels about that purchase. If one were to look at their life from the outside, it would look the stereotypical definition of the American Dream. They've both come from modest means--John even more so, as he refers to his class status growing up as "Trash"--and now they have successful careers, and they own a house for the first time. Biss, though, pays attention to all she's spending (literally and metaphorically) to own that house and all that comes with it.
She explores the ideas of consumption (note how that's related to both food and a disease), work, investment, service, and accounting, playing with each of those terms, interrogating them to see what secrets they'll divulge about the way we live in this late Capitalist country. One of her main ideas concerns time, as that's what she wants more than anything else, especially time to write. She muses on whether she's willing to pay in other ways in order to buy time (note the terminology we use throughout our everyday life surrounding these ideas) to write.
Ultimately, her thoughts remind me of a famous quote from Henry David Thoreau in Walden: "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us." Or there's William Wordsworth's "The world is too much with us/Getting and spending we lay waste our powers..." We're taught that home ownership is key to the American Dream--and it is a solid way to build generational wealth--but aren't told about the nightmare side of that dream, that, on some level, we are owned by our homes as much as we own them. Biss pushes that idea throughout Capitalism altogether to question how we spend (there it is again) our time and energy, as well as our money.