That Eric Alper

For years, one of the publishing world’s worst-kept secrets was hiding in plain sight. The author behind some of the most compulsively readable domestic thrillers of the past decade, a woman known to millions of readers as Freida McFadden, was living a double life. Not the kind that ends in a twist on page 300, but a quieter, more ordinary one: bestselling novelist by night, brain disorder specialist by day, wig by necessity because, as she puts it, she genuinely has no idea how to style her hair.

This week, McFadden ended the mystery. Her real name is Sara Cohen, she is a physician based outside Boston, and she is tired of being a secret.

“I’m at a point in my career when I’m tired of this being a secret,” she told USA Today. “I’m tired of people debating if I’m a real person or if I’m three men. I am a real person and I have a real identity and I don’t have anything to hide.”

The pseudonym was never intended as an elaborate ruse. When Cohen self-published her first novel, The Devil Wears Scrubs, in 2013, a fictionalised account of her life as a medical resident, she simply didn’t want her writing to complicate her work at the hospital. She chose the name Freida as a quiet insider joke, lifting it from FREIDA, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database used by medical trainees. It was the kind of detail that would fit neatly into one of her own books.

For years the system worked. Cohen wrote prolifically, turning out psychological thriller after psychological thriller while maintaining her clinical practice, all while keeping the two identities carefully separate. She worried her patients might feel uncomfortable being treated by someone whose imagination ran to murders, secrets, and women imprisoned in beautiful houses. She worried about professionalism. She worried, as many writers do, about whether she could possibly be as interesting in real life as the version people had constructed in their heads.

What she didn’t count on was becoming one of the bestselling authors in the world.

The Housemaid, published in 2022, changed everything. The novel became an international sensation, spawning sequels and landing on bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2025, it was adapted into a film starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried that grossed nearly 400 million dollars at the box office, making it the highest-grossing film of director Paul Feig’s career. A second film is already in development. In the UK alone, Cohen sold 2.6 million books in 2025 under her pen name, making her the second bestselling author of the year behind only Julia Donaldson, the woman who wrote The Gruffalo.

The bigger the success became, the harder the secret was to keep. Colleagues at the hospital eventually put the pieces together after recognising her from a photo taken at a public appearance. Rather than making things awkward, they rallied around her. They kept quiet on social media, became fans, and she thanked them with a book signing at work. She was, by her own account, completely overwhelmed trying to sustain both lives, and in late 2023 she stepped back from full-time medicine. She now works one or two days a month.

With that distance came the freedom to finally say her own name out loud.

Cohen is clear that the unmasking changes nothing about her relationship with her readers. She is still Freida to them, still the same writer who has published 29 novels, still the same person who has shared, as she puts it, the real me all along. The name is new. The rest, she insists, is exactly the same.

It is, as she cheerfully acknowledges, considerably less dramatic than anything she has ever put in a book. But there is something quietly fitting about it: a writer who built a career on the idea that the most ordinary-looking lives contain the most astonishing secrets, turning out to have been living one herself all along.