One of the biggest mysteries in publishing has been solved, after the best-selling US author known to millions of readers as Freida McFadden revealed her true identity.
McFadden has been one of the world's most popular authors of recent years, thanks to thrillers like The Housemaid.
The author has never made a secret of the fact Freida McFadden is a pseudonym, and that she also works as a doctor, but had never revealed her real name.
She has now told USA Today she is actually Sara Cohen. I'm at a point in my career when I'm tired of this being a secret, she explained. 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.
Under the name McFadden, she was the second best-selling author of 2025 in the UK, selling 2.6 million books, and sold six million print copies in her home country.
Those sales were fuelled by the success of The Housemaid, which was first published in 2022 and was turned into a film last year starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried.
Only The Gruffalo author Julia Donaldson sold more books overall than McFadden in the UK in 2025.
Cohen initially chose a pen name to hide her true identity when she self-published her first book, a fictionalised account of her life as a resident doctor, titled The Devil Wears Scrubs, in 2013.
She chose the name Freida as a medical in-joke - after a hospital training registry, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.
She continued writing while working as a doctor specialising in brain disorders in Boston, Massachusetts, and her publishing career took off when she began penning psychological thrillers.
But she kept the two identities separate, telling the New York Times in 2024 that she worried her patients might feel weird about being treated by a best-selling thriller writer.
But that success allowed her to go part-time as a doctor in 2023, and she has now scaled back that work further, making it easier to reveal her true identity.
She added: I just realised I was completely overwhelmed from trying to do both. She also faces the challenge of maintaining her double identity, sharing that a colleague recently recognized her from a photo.
Despite this revelation, Cohen wishes to continue to engage with her readers under her pen name, emphasizing that her identity as Freida has always been genuine.
