Do You Remember?

Although McFadden has written nearly two dozen novels as of 2025, many of them bestsellers, she uses a nom de plume because she prefers to keep her real-life identity a secret. The author’s pseudonym is based on “the acronym for the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database, which helps medical students to find hospital placements” (Pavia, Will. “Meet ‘Freida Mcfadden’, the Doctor Hiding Her Secret Life as a Bestselling Author.” The Times, 12 Mar. 2025). Thus, she doesn’t share with her colleagues that she spends her days off writing, and she never attends book signings or conferences. In a 2022 article, she wrote:

I’m a physician and I do not want my patients to know. Would most people be cool with their doctor writing psychological thrillers? Sure, probably […]. Then again, I have to say, I don’t know how I would feel if I knew my physician wrote a book in which a surgeon’s patients are systematically murdered (“My Double Life by Freida McFadden.” Women Writers Women Books, 26 Apr. 2022).

McFadden feels that she can always choose to tell people about her secret life, but she can never put the cat back in the bag. Furthermore, it seems easier—with her patients, at least—to keep her authorship to herself.

McFadden’s characters could be problematic if they shared too many similarities with her real-life patients or even her coworkers. She notes:

The contents of my books are private [because] readers are people who don’t know me. My books are a window into my thoughts, and I don’t like the idea of people who know me in real life having that window into my thoughts. And what will my coworker say about the fact that the evil husband in my latest book has the same name as he does??? (“My Double Life”).

Certainly, a colleague or the husband of a patient called “Graham” might be offended to learn that he shares the name with Graham Thurman of Do You Remember? Likewise, McFadden’s novels so frequently feature vicious characters, wicked deceptions, and various kinds of emotional and physical abuse that patients and coworkers might develop concerns for McFadden’s well-being. Do You Remember? not only features a criminally deceptive and exploitative husband but also includes Lucy, Tess’s underhanded and disloyal best friend.

One interviewer reports the speculation that McFadden is simply an artificial intelligence (AI) creation, since she writes so prolifically in addition to seeing patients in a Boston-area hospital. However, he writes, “McFadden appears before me on a video call, pale with curly auburn hair that I suppose might be a wig, as someone on Reddit suggests, and oval glasses. These could be part of her disguise too” (“Meet ‘Freida McFadden.’”). Her appearance, which may or may not be altered to protect her real identity, calls to mind Harry Finch, who grows a beard and dons a hat and sunglasses so that he can meet Tess in secret. As Do You Remember? demonstrates (and as McFadden herself seems keenly aware), people aren’t always as they seem.