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

From the acclaimed author of Thrown, a wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America. A lone young woman stuffs a state secret under her skirt, trusts the wrong people to help, and joins a strange community of fellow travelers. A California teenager sets off on a religious journey, only to find himself trapped in a flooded basement under siege. A nation loses faith in its spies, and finds solace in a fraudulent whistleblower. In this groundbreaking work of narrative nonfiction, Kerry Howley builds a map of a parallel universe, drawing in Reality Winner, Lady Gaga, John Walker Lindh, Q, a rescue dog named Outlaw Babyface Nelson, and a mother who will do whatever it takes to get her daughter out of jail. Flooded with information and yet bereft of knowledge, Howley’s subjects face a challenge new to history: they are imprisoned by their past selves, trapped for as long as the Internet endures, allowed to forget neither transient moments in their own lives nor the devastating secrets they’re expected to keep. In following these characters, Howley asks essential questions about modern life that most are unwilling to confront. 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. 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 sacred, an enthralling investigation into the nature of memory itself.