Freida McFadden

Freida McFadden (born May 1, 1980, Manhattan, New York, U.S.) American psychological thriller novelist who is also a practicing physician specializing in brain disorders and injuries. She disclosed her real name as Sara Cohen in April 2026; Freida McFadden is a pseudonym she had adopted to keep her career as an author distinct from her interactions with her patients. She is best known for her 2022 novel The Housemaid, which sold over 6.5 million copies and was adapted into a successful 2025 film starring Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney. In 2024 The New York Times named her the top-selling thriller writer in the U.S.

Early life and education

McFadden was raised in midtown Manhattan; her father is a psychiatrist and her mother a podiatrist. As a three-year-old, she told her parents that she wanted to be a doctor too. She was an intelligent child who loved math and reading. Growing up, her favorite authors included Lois Duncan and Louis Sachar. Her father encouraged her to read literary fiction, and her mother introduced her to suspenseful thriller books by Mary Higgins Clark and Robin Cook. She enjoyed writing as a hobby, took as many writing classes in school as she could, and filled notebooks with stories.

McFadden attended Harvard University as an undergraduate, where she initially studied mathematics before deciding to shift her focus to premedical coursework. She later studied at Stony Brook University before attending Stanford University to complete her residency. While in medical school and during her residency, she wrote about the harsh realities and frustrations of working in medicine in a private blog. Having always dreamt of publishing a novel, she later repurposed some of her observations from the blog into fictionalized medical school stories and began submitting them to publishers and agents.

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Writing career and style

McFadden eventually turned to self-publishing after being rejected by the publishing industry. “My goal wasn’t to be famous, just to get my book into readers’ hands,” she told an interviewer with the Catalan newspaper Ara. She chose her pseudonym as a hat tip to her medical career: Freida is the acronym for the American Medical Association’s Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database tool. She selected McFadden as her surname because she thought it sounded funny; she isn’t Irish.

McFadden published her first book, The Devil Wears Scrubs, through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing in August 2013. In the book, intern Dr. Jane McGill works 30-hour shifts under a cruel and demanding senior resident, Dr. Alyssa Morgan, and worries that she won’t survive the year without losing her sanity. She continued McGill’s story in 2017’s The Devil You Know, which sees McGill married to a loving husband but flirting with the idea of reuniting with a surgeon she dated years ago.

In 2014 McFadden published what would be the first of numerous thrillers. Suicide Med (revised and rereleased as Dead Med in 2024) is about a shooting that takes place at a medical school with a tragic history of students overdosing on drugs. Her first psychological thriller, Brain Damage, was published in 2016. It tells the story of a successful dermatologist who is shot in the right side of her head, loses her memory, and slowly pieces things together to figure out who tried to kill her.

From then on, McFadden focused her writing solely on psychological thrillers, of which she has published more than twenty. Her thrillers typically feature female protagonists and begin with a murder, a killer closing in on the narrator, or an arrest. They then go back in time to explain how the event came to transpire. As such, they have been called formulaic. They are also widely known for their twists, in which the heroine often has a dark secret, and the characters turn out to be the opposite of what they are initially made out to be.

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Some of her popular stand-alone novels include:

• The Surrogate Mother (2018): Abby’s personal assistant, Monica, offers to be a pregnancy surrogate, but harbors dark secrets of which Abby, who has previously struggled to be a mother, is unaware.
• The Ex (2019): Cassie is stalked by her boyfriend’s former girlfriend, Francesca.
• The Locked Door (2021): When she is 11 years old, Nora discovers that her father is a serial killer and has to deal with a killer using the same modus operandi a few decades later.
• Do Not Disturb (2021): Quinn kills her abusive husband in self-defense and flees the country only to end up stranded at a “Murder Motel” during a snowstorm.
• The Inmate (2022): Brooke is a nurse at a men’s maximum-security prison, and has ties to Shane, one of the most dangerous people incarcerated there.
• The Boyfriend (2024): Sydney has a new boyfriend, who seems perfect but may be a serial killer.
• Dear Debbie (2026): Debbie, an advice writer, has been fired, and her family is keeping secrets from her.

McFadden signed with e-book publisher Bookouture in January 2022 to digitally reissue her back catalog. In 2023 she came to an agreement with Sourcebooks’ mystery and thriller imprint, Poisoned Pen Press, allowing them to print many of her new and backlist books.

The Housemaid series

In 2022 the first book in McFadden’s best-selling Housemaid series was published. The Housemaid centers on a down-on-her-luck woman recently out of prison, Millie Calloway, who finds work as a live-in housemaid for Nina and Andrew Winchester and their daughter Cecelia. Millie soon realizes that the Winchesters’ perfect facade is an illusion after Nina’s behavior grows increasingly erratic and disturbing events take place, resulting in Millie being trapped in a situation that forces her to go to extremes to survive.

The Housemaid won the 2023 International Thriller Writers award for best paperback original novel. A film adaptation of the novel, directed by Paul Feig and starring Sydney Sweeney as Millie and Amanda Seyfried as Nina, was released in December 2025 and was a box office success, grossing almost $400 million worldwide. McFadden followed up The Housemaid with two additional novels, The Housemaid’s Secret (2023) and The Housemaid Is Watching (2024), as well as a short story, The Housemaid’s Wedding (2024), each of which follows Millie as she navigates new challenges.

Revelation of her real name

McFadden’s real identity was not revealed for several years, though certain facts, such as her being a practicing physician and her date and city of birth, were provided on her website. On April 8, 2026, the author, who had thus far made public appearances wearing a wig, disclosed her real name as Sara Cohen. She stated that the pseudonym helped her balance her work as a doctor with her writing career, but her rising popularity as an author eventually led her, in late 2023, to step away from a full-time hospital job. Cohen lives with her husband, an engineer who she met at school, and two children in Boston.