If you’ve got a little time, I have seen no better example that encapsulates, in one man’s story, the mania that preceded the housing bubble and its very painful aftermath.

His story is jaw-dropping. A financial correspondent for the NY Times Washington bureau, Edmund L. Andrews’s $120,000 salary was never going to support $4,000 in monthly alimony payments and a half-million-dollar new home for his new wife and family.

It’s also the best example I’ve seen that intellectual smarts are no match for the emotional, and often lengthy, process of dealing with changing financial circumstances. Personal finance can be painful. Like many, he couldn’t face it in time, and now he’ll probably lose his house.

No schadenfreude here. There but for the grace… At least he was smart enough to write a book about it (“Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown,” out next month). Who knows, maybe that will save them. Or at least help the comeback.

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