If 2020 was the year everybody masked up; 2026 is shaping up to be the year of unmasking. We are four months in and have already seen two of the art world’s most industriously maintained mysteries come apart. The subjects, since you ask, are Banksy and Freida McFadden.
For most of recorded history, Anonymous was a woman, as Virginia Woolf famously said. I was among the minority who hoped against hope that Banksy might yet prove her right, and the graffiti artist whose subversive stenciled work has appeared on courthouse walls, war-torn landscapes, was outed as Robin Gunningham of Bristol, who has ostensibly, legally changed his name to David Jones to throw off the tail.
The second unmasking was more satisfying for me, as among the theories circulating on the internet was
that McFadden was actually three men posing as a woman. Turns out, McFadden is a woman, and what’s more not three women, but just one woman, thank you very much.
As it turns out, she is a neurologist writing about women murdering men, and plotting psychological thrillers, which is a rather unique way to use her professional training.
3 imaginary men, 1 real women
In an exclusive interview with USA TODAY, McFadden revealed that her real name is Sara Cohen. She had been living, in the tradition of English literature’s most famous physician, a Jekyll-and-Hyde double life–one half devoted to saving lives in a neurology ward, the other to imagining, in considerable and marketable detail, how her female protagonists might end them. The wig, she says, was not disguise so much as a personal failing, she says, she simply cannot do her hair, and the glasses are genuine.
Why come out now?
So, why stay hidden for so long only to come out now? Was this a marketing gig? And, did suit her to reveal her identity now after a commercially successful movie adaptation? All are valid questions, but McFadden says she did it to keep her professional identity as a respected doctor from her identity as a writer of mysteries.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) in 1850. (Wikimedia Commons)
She kept her identity a secret, despite becoming progressively famous, because she did not want her hospital to know. Every woman reading this has already nodded and moved on. Cohen, however, is in distinguished company. Mary Ann Evans published as George Eliot because she had correctly calculated that Victorian critics would not take a woman’s philosophical novels on their merits, The Bronte sisters wrote as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and Alice Sheldon, a WWII army officer and CIA intelligence analyst, published her science fiction as James Tiptree Jr, which critics called “ineluctably masculine.”
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And, everybody knows the story of JK Rowling, going by her initials rather than her name Joanne, on the advice of her publisher, the reasoning being that boys would not read a book by a woman, even if it were called Harry Potter.
And, let us not forget Elena Ferrante, whom the literary establishment spent several years attempting to unmask, to no avail.
Removing the mask versus unmasking
It is heartening to know that Cohen was not unmasked under duress, but rather chose to reveal her identity. In fact, she told USA TODAY her colleagues had divined that Dr Cohen was the thriller writer McFadden, and had even be reading her books on their lunch break.
She says she is now choosing to reveal her real name because she is tired of strangers whether she is one man or three.
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She is undoubtedly one of the commercially successful thriller writers, with one film adaptation starring Sydney Sweeney out, and a second in production.
It is a win for the author, it is a win for her fans, and it is also a win for the genre. The domestic thriller genre receives the critical treatment its considerable fanbase has come to expect. It is known that domestic thrillers are written overwhelmingly by women, read overwhelmingly by women, and reviewed with the mild approval one extends to things one has decided not to take seriously. The books are about what happens to women inside their own homes and, it is telling that the author did not feel safe enough to go by her own name.
It is reason to rejoice that she does now, and that she surrendered on her own terms, ahead of her next book.
(As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word. Views expressed are personal.)
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) in 1850. (Wikimedia Commons)