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(Part three of my memory lane ramblings. Follow my R&R Twitter feed on this page or on Twitter at @joesview.)

We’ve had countless memoirs about drug addiction and all sorts of sexual debauchery, but Avis Cardella’s new book “Spent” (Little, Brown and Co.) is about a vice that the culture too often presents as a virtue — living way beyond your means thanks to that insidious banking “product” known as the credit card.

A few months ago, when the Obama administration’s credit card “reforms” went into effect, millions of Americans got a horrendous wake-up call — a new little box on their monthly bill spelling out exactly how long it will take them to pay off their rotating balance if they stick to minimum monthly payments.

I have a friend who found out that the life of her five-figure credit card balance will extend well beyond the real time she probably has left on Earth (according to life insurance actuarial tables).

What the Obama people probably thought was a service — making the banks tell card holders how much they can save if they pay off their bills in three years rather than 30 — is turning out to be a monthly torture for people who are in too deep to start really chipping away at their balances.

It might have been more of a service to middle class America to reinstate the pre-Reagan Era caps on the amount of interest that can be charged on credit cards — the current rates go way beyond the 20 percent fees that were once outlawed as ”usury” and were strictly the province of  mob-connected loan sharks. Sadly, the banking industry lobbyists did their job when it came to halting any legislation that might offer practical financial relief to credit addicts.

Cardella’s book shows us the underbelly of the Carrie Bradshaw lifestyle at the turn of the century when the writers of “Sex & the City” could joke about the way their free-lance writer heroine had used enough credit on designer shoes to have financed the down payment on a Manhattan apartment. Cardella lived the Carrie life of working for fashion magazines — where she became particularly prized for her pieces on fashion photography — but she was secretly going deep into debt as her spending went out of control.

The writer doesn’t blame the banks for her scary situation — and a ruined credit rating — but it does seem to be unethical to encourage people with limited means to go so deeply into high-interest debt.

Cardella writes with great style of the irrational exuberance of the high flying late 1990s: “Toward the end of the decade, there was a giddiness that seemed to have taken hold of Manhattan. It mixed with the oxygen in the air. There was opportunity, optimism, and froth: an endless stream of all the right parties and all the right people.”

The author flew to Paris where she attended a Louis Vuitton party in a “Rifat Ozbek gown with a bodice ornamented with tiny mirrors.”

“There I was, at cocktails, mingling with Gerard Depardieu, Rupert Everett, Beatrice Dalle, and Vivienne Westwood. Later, I sat through dinner watching, dumbstruck, the extravagant presentation, a commingling of live animals, contortionists, and one-of-a-kind handbags. The event was luxe and lavish and completely surreal.”

Unlike middle class people of the 1950s and 1960s, the Cardella generation didn’t have to be content with sitting in movie theaters or at home watching television dreaming of deluxe consumer goods that would be forever out of financial reach. Thanks to credit cards, the writer was able to live in a delusion of wealth, where the $500 “impulse” purchase of a pair of shoes was totally possible.

Cardella later realized that her money madness was part of the prolonged denial of the grief she stifled after her beloved mother died, but she didn’t really wake up until she was in her 40s and saw that sexual relationships and even some of her friendships had been built on lies she told herself about money. “Spent” is about a society in which our leaders counseled us to shop as a way of coping with September 11.

“Shopping, they suggested, was patriotic. It was good for the economy. It was an activity that would help people regain a sense of normalcy,” Cardella writes in one of the book’s strongest sections.

“Wasn’t that what I had been doing almost all my adult life? Hadn’t that been exactly what I had done to regain normalcy after my mother’s death? Still, it struck me as a peculiar prescription in a moment of unprecendented destruction. Go shopping! Is that what we had become as a nation?
Buying is much more American than thinking.”