The author also revealed she suffers from social anxiety, furthering her need for privacy. She’s often worried that reality won’t live up to her readers’ expectations. All of which to say, being a globally bestselling author can create a lot of pressure, a task not every writer feels up to fulfilling on every single front.
Before she rose to fame in the early 2020s thanks to BookTok and other bookish social media, McFadden had already authored some eight previous novels and shared that she has two children. According to interviews she gave to both The Times and The New York Times, she grew up in New York City with one sibling, and her divorced parents were both doctors—a psychiatrist and a podiatrist. She attended a rigorous, competitive Manhattan high school, which she believes contributed to her unwavering work ethic in adulthood. She studied mathematics at Harvard before going on to medical school, while always pursuing creative writing on the side.
“Writing was never something I thought of as a career but a hobby,” McFadden stated in an interview with the Washington Post. She submitted many a manuscript to literary agents and publishers before she began self-publishing her fiction, beginning with 2013’s The Devil Wears Scrubs, the first of two novels featuring the character Dr. Jane McGill. “When self-publishing became a thing, I had been writing a blog about my experience training in medicine, so I wrote a book about my intern year of residency,” she said. “I just published it for fun. I sold a couple thousand copies, and I was so happy. I thought that was the end of my writing.”
But as copies kept selling, the writer kept writing.
McFadden told The Washington Post that 2019’s The Ex was her breakthrough novel, and she attributed its success to the large amount of Amazon advertisements she bought for it. “[It] sold better than anything I’d published before,” she said. “So, I just kept going.”
The newspaper described her books as “accessible” because they’re written in the first-person present tense. While her characters “aren’t always believable or likable,” the “many twists keep the plot moving quickly.” In 2021, amid COVID lockdowns, McFadden’s success continued to grow, aided by the surge in new readers signing up for Kindle Unlimited. She was soon approached by the ebook company Bookouture, which wanted to buy one of her books. The author initially said no because she liked having complete creative control, but they wore her down by continuously asking for just one book.
That book turned out to be The Housemaid.
“It just took off in a way that I did not expect,” McFadden said. “[Bookouture is] an ebook publisher, so I thought maybe it would hit the Top 1,000, maybe the Top 100 on Amazon, and that would be it—end of story. Then Grand Central, their print partner, picked it up.” With the help of BookTok and Bookstagram, McFadden’s sales numbers just kept climbing. Soon, she was outselling the likes of James Patterson, Sarah J. Maas, and Colleen Hoover.
In the midst of what felt like overnight success, McFadden had to cut back on her physician hours to balance her growing literary status. “At the end of 2023, I started to work one day a week, but it became too much. It’s been very different working with a publisher rather than self-publishing,” she said to The Washington Post. “I just couldn’t do it all.”
But she maintains that she never got into writing with the idea of quitting her day job.
“I kept clinging to being a doctor because, first, I worked very hard to get there and I find it really rewarding,” McFadden told Parade magazine. “I love seeing patients and helping people. And the idea of not doing that anymore, I just couldn’t imagine it. It’s become such a big part of my identity.”
Although she’s shy and values her privacy, many of the characters within McFadden’s novels are the opposite of shy. One might even describe them as unhinged. These types of characters might be the last thing you would expect from someone with McFadden’s personality, but she described the need for unstable characters in her work as necessary. “A character who is shy and doesn’t do much isn’t very interesting. Some of the characters are like me, if I made different decisions in life,” she said. “I am not a gambler; I’m very safe. Everything I do, I put tons of thought into, and that doesn’t make a very interesting character.”
The number of standalone novels that McFadden has written pales in comparison to her series of books, so if you’re in the market for a twisty psychological thriller, this author’s catalogue has more than got you covered. If you’re looking to cash in on the hype of The Housemaid aided by its recent film adaptation, start there. Otherwise, The Crash or The Perfect Son make for a good night of making your eyelids fight the urge to close. From there, read her latest novel, whose title departs from the majority of its predecessors, Dear Debbie.
Wherever you start, you’re bound to sink in like quicksand.
English (US) · 