Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State

Kerry Howley

Mar 2023 · Sold by Vintage

About this ebook

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A VANITY FAIR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“Riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.” – The New York Times

A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown

Who are you? You are data about data. You are a map of connections—a culmination of everything you have ever posted, searched, emailed, liked, and followed. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley investigates the curious implications of living in the age of the indelible. Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs tells the true story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, a lone young woman who stuffs a state secret under her skirt and trusts the wrong people to help. After printing five pages of dangerous information she was never supposed to see, Winner finds herself at the mercy of forces more invasive than she could have possibly imagined.

Following Winner’s unlikely journey from rural Texas to a federal courtroom, Howley maps a hidden world, drawing in John Walker Lindh, Lady Gaga, Edward Snowden, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Howley’s subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures. A soap opera set in the deep state, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is a free fall into a world where everything is recorded and nothing is sacred, from a singular writer unafraid to ask essential questions about the strangeness of modern life.

Ratings and reviews

The writer is a good prose writer, she can describe scenes that you can envision in your mind as you read. However, on the subject of this book, supposedly about the "deep state," she really has little to add or say. She mostly describes individual victims of supposed governmental overreach, in some cases there was, in some, not. The victims are in some cases just naive and foolish, in other cases, angry and misled. But she fails to distinguish effectively between these, apparently satisfied to simply throw paint on a canvas, ala Jackson Pollock. So she is basically writing a nonfiction book that has no real point of view, apparently as a writing exercise. It's not journalism or analysis that clarifies anything, except maybe, don't believe what the government tells you and don't try to take it on singlehandedly. Other than an implicit explanation of one facet of attraction to DJT, which the author fails to make explicit, there is no point to this book.

About the author

KERRY HOWLEY is a feature writer at New York magazine and the author of Thrown, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Best American Sportswriting, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s. A Lannan Foundation Fellow, she holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was a professor at the celebrated Nonfiction Writing Program until joining New York. She lives in Los Angeles.