Ian YoungsCulture reporter
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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.
She is a prolific writer, having published 29 novels so far, and has already topped the best-seller charts this year with three books - The Housemaid, Want to Know a Secret? and Dear Debbie.
'Patients might find it weird'
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.
"At work, I want to be a doctor," she said. "A lot of my books have medical stuff in them, and I don't want people saying, 'Is this based on me?' It feels unprofessional."
"I love that people are reading my books," she said. "But the spotlight on me specifically is hard...
"It's not just about privacy but also about social anxiety," she told the paper, saying her success as an author had escalated her fears that she may not be "that amazing person that everyone expects you to be".
'Hospital colleague recognised me'
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.
"My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was [ready to] step back from my doctor job, so it wouldn't be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job," she told USA Today.
"But I have stepped away from my job. I'm only working like once or twice a month."
She added: "I just realised I was completely overwhelmed from trying to do both."
It had also become increasingly difficult to maintain her double identity.
She told the Times this January: "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.
"But they've been really respectful about not posting anything about me on social media, and I tried to repay them with a book signing at work."
When doing public interviews or appearances as Freida, Cohen wears a wig - but only because "I have no idea how to style my hair", she told USA Today.
She said she still wants her fans - the McFans and Freida Readahs - to continue to know her by her pen name.
"Even though I haven't told my real name until now, I feel like I have shared the real me all along and everything I've told them has been the truth," she said.
"Even though the name will be a surprise, nothing else will. I've always been genuine with my readers."
