Freida McFadden, the pen name of the international bestselling author, self-published her first novel in 2013 and has since written an impressive 23 more, selling over six million copies …
Freida’s 2022 novel, The Housemaid, became an international bestseller and is currently being adapted into a movie starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried. She is also a practising medical doctor specialising in brain injury. She lives with her family and cat in Boston.
ON HOME I’m from New York City and that feels like home to me more than anywhere else. Th e place where you grew up just feels like home. I’ve moved around a lot since then and I’m now settled in the Boston area.
ON FAMILY My mom is a podiatrist and my dad is a psychiatrist. We had a normal upbringing but my parents divorced, so that was a little diff erent. I think it inspired my writing a little. I have a younger brother who works in the music industry. He’s really good with business-related advice. As you get older, and your parents are getting older, it’s so good to have a sibling you can bounce things off . It’s a really important relationship.
ON ROOTS Both my parents grew up in Brooklyn, and all my grandparents and some of my great-grandparents were born there too. New York City and Brooklyn are my culture and heritage. When I read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn a few years ago it reminded me so much of my family.
ON MY DESK I write on my living room sofa. I have actually tried to make my sofa as ergonomic as I can, with a lumbar support pillow and a footrest. It’s just the most comfortable place in my house. It’s also the place where people are likely to interrupt me – and they do. Maybe I’m inspired to write quickly because I know there’s going to be a kid running into the room at any minute. We finally got a door to our living room though, so at least now I can close it.
ON WRITING I spend a lot of time planning the book in my head and the physical writing is quick. I’ll think about a book for months and then I like to blow through the fi rst draft really fast because once I’m writing, it’s all I can think about. My agent wanted me to take a break from something I was writing but I said, I can’t, because I can’t sleep until I finish it. If I’m in the middle of a story and I wake up at 3am, I can’t get back to sleep because I’ll start thinking about the story. So I really try to get that draft out quickly so I can sleep again! I do love it. I really feel like I’m going on a ride. It’s like jumping out of a plane. It’s fun, but you can’t do it all the time. When it’s written, I’ll spend another year editing it.
ON SUCCESS It’s still shocking to me. I genuinely started doing this for fun. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere and then it became a fun challenge – let me see if I can get more readers – and then it just exploded. I can’t talk about my success without acknowledging that part of it is luck, everything falling into place at the right time. There are a lot of really talented writers out there who should be much more popular than they are … I got lucky; it was a case of right place, right time, right book. I couldn’t replicate it if I wanted to.
ON BOOKSHOPS I love Barnes and Noble and also Belmont Books in Belmont, a town in Massachusetts. I love to support local bookstores. It’s a hard market now with cheap books online so if I can help my local bookstore I will.
The Boyfriend (Poisoned Pen Press, €10.99) is out now.
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