Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | April 9, 2026
Freida McFadden is one of the biggest selling authors of the 2020s, thanks to books like The Housemaid. She’s never made a secret of the fact that McFadden is her pseudonym and that she has retained her private identity as a doctor to avoid complications at work. But now, she’s revealing her real name because she’s sick of people thinking someone else wrote her work.
As she revealed to USA Today, her name is 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.” McFadden is a doctor based in Boston who who specialises in brain disorders. When she started writing fiction in 2013, she chose the name Freida as a medical in-joke, after a hospital training registry called the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.
She didn’t want her colleagues or patients to have to worry about her author life, nor did she want it to compromise her ability to do her job. But now she’s way too famous for that, and she’s made enough money from her books to go focus more on writing than brains. “I just realised I was completely overwhelmed from trying to do both.” Given that she wrote 29 books while working full-time in an immensely high-pressure field, one wonders how much quicker she’ll be able to churn them out now that she’s not in the hospital five days a week.
And yes, she’s wearing a wig in those author photos.
