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Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey Through the Deep State
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About This Book
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.
Reviews
"Howley's capacity for incisive empathy extends to those whom most would dismiss as kooks."
"The arc of Howley's extraordinary book feels both startling and inevitable; of course a journey through the deep state would send her down the rabbit hole."
"Witty, humane, and fiercely intelligent, this is a striking critique of a world intent on 'burying itself' in information."
"Written playfully but interpreted as serious, and suggests that we all might be subject to danger from the same sort of posts, preserved without our knowledge in government databases."
"A literate, readable meditation on the surveillance state and its discontents."
"Howley's prose reminded me of Don DeLillo's ..."
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