Freida McFadden has revealed that her real name is Sara Cohen, ending years of speculation around the bestselling thriller writer who built a huge audience behind a pen name. Cohen told she was tired of people debating whether she was a real person or even three men.
Cohen has spent years balancing that hidden identity with work as a doctor, including specialty care in brain disorders in Boston, Massachusetts. She chose the Freida McFadden name when she self-published her first book, The Devil Wears Scrubs, in 2013, a fictionalized version of her life as a resident doctor.
The reveal lands at the point where Cohen can no longer be described as an obscure writer keeping one foot in medicine. In 2025, she sold 2.6 million books in the UK under the McFadden name and has sold six million print copies in her home country, while topping the best-seller charts this year with The Housemaid, Want to Know a Secret? and Dear Debbie. She has published 29 novels so far, and The Housemaid, first published in 2022, was turned into a film last year starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried.
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The move also fits the way Cohen has described her career in public before now. In 2024, she told she worried patients might feel weird about being treated by a best-selling thriller writer, and told the Washington Post that she did not like to be the centre of attention. She went part-time as a doctor in 2023, but said her goal had been to keep the secret until she was ready to step back from medicine so it would not affect the people she worked with or compromise her ability to do the job.
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That is the tension in her story: the name that sold millions of books was already one of the most successful in commercial fiction, but the person behind it had made a career of staying out of view. Cohen has now put her real name on record because, as she put it, she was tired of the secrecy. The mystery is over, and the books, not the pseudonym, are what will keep doing the work.
