Freida McFadden is an international woman of mystery. On the one hand, she is a Harvard-educated doctor specialising in brain disorders; on the other, she is a bestselling author of airport thrillers with a slavishly devoted global following.
Although she began her writing life with a little blog, self-publishing rapidly written page-turners for 10 years for a small audience (at least at first), she is now one of the most successful authors in the world, having sold 36 million copies of her books to date (including audio and e-books).
And while McFadden writes under a nom de plume to protect her privacy (she is still a practising medic and lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children) and allegedly avoids book tours and signings, her approach to discretion also seems, let’s say, conflicted. She has now given multiple interviews in which she is fully pictured.
“One of my colleagues at the hospital recently recognised me in a Freida photo and told everyone, so the cat is out of the bag,” she recently told The Sunday Times. Surely, we are mere moments away from an internet sleuth working out her real name and McFadden’s neurological patients asking for a selfie. Not least because one of her books, The Housemaid, was recently made into a hit film starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried. “I have no interest in being famous,” she also told the paper. Well, bad news McFadden. You very much are.
So, just what is it about her books that people love? McFadden, now 45, has just published Dear Debbie, her 27th novel in 13 years. Dear Debbie is a psychological thriller and revenge fantasy about an advice columnist in New England who gets fired and immediately goes about getting her own back on everyone who has wronged her.
Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried in ‘The Housemaid’, adapted from Freida McFadden’s novel (Photo: Daniel McFadden/Lionsgate)As with most McFadden books, there’s a strong domestic element, including a handsome but shady husband and lots of rich, idle wives. Also like most McFadden books, readers find it immensely readable, despite observing that it is “giving fast fashion” and noting her “signature exaggeration”. One reader on Goodreads cites the “pacing that never dipped” and the book’s “unapologetic energy”. Another references the “dark humor” and “the crazy twist”, common accolades for McFadden.
Most of her acolytes admit to tearing through her novels one after another. Either you can’t finish a McFadden novel – no one is pretending these are Booker prize-winners – or you’re probably going to read them all. As a keen thriller reader myself, I’d say the energy is key. I read The Housemaid for the purposes of this article, and although I already knew the plot, I wolfed it down.
The story of McFadden’s career and word of mouth global success really is the stuff of pulp fiction. She grew up in New York, with two medical parents – a psychiatrist and a podiatrist – who have since divorced. She always wanted to be a doctor and read maths at Harvard before going to medical school.
She wrote all the time, but kept getting nowhere with book agents and so eventually in 2013 self-published her first book, The Devil Wears Scrubs, about a junior doctor with a mean boss, based on her own experiences. Her pen name is an acronym for the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database, which helps medical students find training programs. The type of joke is very typical of McFadden. Her books have a tongue-in-cheek quality, a self-awareness that is probably what helps them feel so relatable and is quite a rare quality in the thriller genre.
When the book unexpectedly sold a few thousand copies, she realised that there might be a market for “medical-ish women’s fiction”, and started scribbling away at night, at naptimes, during lunch-breaks any chance she got. A decade later, and now an Amazon best-seller, she signed with the digital publisher Bookouture. The Housemaid was published under this new arrangement and flew off the (proverbial) shelves.
A year later, she got picked up by the Sourcebooks thriller imprint Poisoned Pen Press, which has released her backlist, as well as two Housemaid sequels, and she is now the fastest-selling thriller writer in the US, outstripping big names such as James Patterson and John Grisham. Right now, four of the top 10 bestselling paperbacks in the UK are McFadden books. McFadden now, unsurprisingly, does her doctoring part-time.
Perhaps inevitably given her prolific output, McFadden is plagued on online forums by accusations of plagiarism. Readers on websites such as Reddit and Goodreads, as well as TikTok and Instagram, note the similarities between several of McFadden’s plots and novels published by other authors, including The Housemaid (spoilers ahead) and a book called The Last Mrs Parrish by Liv Constantine.
The Housemaid is about a young, impoverished woman with a criminal past who goes to work for an incredibly wealthy family, befriending the wife, but having an affair with the husband. The second half has a mega twist that totally upends what you think of every character, and the nature of control and abuse. The Last Mrs Parrish (getting its own film starring Jennifer Lopez next year) is about, ahem, a young, impoverished woman with a criminal past who goes to work for an incredibly wealthy family, befriending the wife, but having an affair with the husband. The second half has, well, basically the exact same twist.
Other notable similarities some have observed include those between The Wife Upstairs and Verity by Colleen Hoover (like McFadden an initially self-published writer who benefited hugely from the BookTok phenomenon), and between The Teacher and My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell, both of the latter books about a young student’s affair with an older educator.
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Some readers have even found strikingly similar prose. In The Teacher, McFadden writes: “And now I’m thirty-eight, and I’m meeting my soulmate for the first time and she’s only sixteen.” In My Dark Vanessa, Russell writes: “‘It’s just my luck,’ he said, ‘that when I finally find my soul mate, she’s fifteen years old.’” Representatives for McFadden declined to comment when The i Paper approached for a response to these allegations.
It’s worth noting that this has happened to plenty of other authors, including Russell herself. When My Dark Vanessa was published in 2020, the author Wendy C Ortiz complained that it was “eerily” similar to her 2014 memoir Excavation, a book Russell admitted to having read. Copyright infringement is, in legal terms, incredibly hard to prove. Plus, how many original ideas are there really? Any thriller reader will tell you that similar structures and themes crop up across the genre, and wealthy housewives with handsome husbands and a grudge are hardly new territory.
So, what’s next? McFadden has hinted that she is going to slow down a bit now that she’s in traditional publishing, with all of its constraints: edits and marketing and publishing obligations.
It will be interesting to see whether any reduced output results in reduced interest. After all, one of the things that “McFans”, as her avid readers are sometimes known, love most is the churn. Like Netflix subscribers, there’s always something more for a McFadden fan. As soon as you finish one book, there’s usually another just around the corner.
‘Dear Debbie’ is published by Sourcebooks, £9.99
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