Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

A Journey Through the Deep State

By: Kerry Howley

Narrated by: Nikki Massoud

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.

©2023 Kerry Howley (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair

“An odyssey through the post-9/11 American security state… Howley’s prose reminded me of Don DeLillo’s, not just in its preternatural attunement to invisible currents of feeling which course between varied pockets of the globalized American project, but also in the feeling that she’d taken her experience of the world and melted it down into a weapon meant to puncture our hardened habits of perception… Bottoms Up restores the world to something akin to its original strangeness. It’s a daring approach, and an invaluable one: seeing the world anew makes it feel, in some small way, up for grabs, and this feeling is a precondition for real thought.”—Peter C. Baker, The New Yorker

“Riveting and darkly funny and, in all senses of the word, unclassifiable. Howley writes about privacy and its absence; about hiding and leaking and secrets and betrayal. But she also writes about the strange experience of living, and how it gets flattened and codified into data that can be turned into portraits of static, permanent beings—creatures who would be unrecognizable to ourselves… 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… We become ourselves by shedding our past selves—but now those discarded selves are recorded somewhere, potentially living longer than we do. In her acknowledgments, Howley ends with a note to her children that could serve as a blessing for us all: ‘May you be only as remembered as you wish.’”—Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

"When whistleblower Reality Winner was arrested in 2017 and later pleaded guilty to sending classified documents to The Intercept, it was a story with huge relevance to the group of activists and journalists with interests in the security state and its overreaches, but it didn’t easily translate to the broader public... Kerry Howley draws an intimate portrait of the woman, her world, and her motivations with literary flair and a wry voice.... Most attempts to understand the war on terror leave a reader with more questions and moral confusion than they began with. In approaching that lack of stability with intellect and keen aesthetics, Howley’s book leaves a reader immeasurably enriched."—Vanity Fair

Well written and to the point

Crazy story(ies) that provide more context to what you may have read in the paper

Really good - But Too Much Focus on Reality Winner

The first half of the book is quite good bouncing around from whistle-blower to whistle-blower and I enjoy the style of writing. As fascinated initially I was with Reality Winners story, the trial was too drawn out. Reality is not inherently more interesting than any other subject, arguably less interesting. Early when discussing Reality Kerry succinctly describes the reason for Realitys persona seemingly a bit rife with contradiction. It is a mark of many other military whistle-blowers- they were not raised by standard middle class intellectuals and don't get a lot of the concepts there in, then their naivety leads to an awakening that results in whistleblowing. Kerry never investigates the specific contradictions contained in Reality further than that. To focus on Realities boring trial lends a girl boss air to the book which should be too self aware for such things. One can't help but feel the focus on an almost middle class white girl is author insertion in a very typical way. Realities story in no way deserves the extra attention receives if the attention is merely on the logistics of the trial and not a philosophical discussion with her as the subject. Why not focus on the contradiction of her aiding in the killing of many innocent people with her intense affinity for helping others and charity work? The first half of the hook leads you to think the threads of the whistle-blower will be tied together more meaningfully than they are, making the product feel unfinished but with good potential, potential it's too late to come to fruition now of course.

Amazing.

I was enthralled from beginning to end. Kerry Howley is a fantastic writer. This book is not only engaging and deeply interesting but important in this day and age.

Great listen

Really like the inside view on how Reality was treated worst than a career criminal. Yes she did leak a “ secret” document but at what harm. Thank for a great book

Deep state more

The storyline all mashed up together but would have wished a little more in the deep state and not just the characters that got swallowed by it.

Compelling read

The author writes with uncommon fluidity. The story is compelling. The connections she makes are thought-provoking.

Eminently Forgettable

Interesting topic, well written but left no trace of recollection when it was gone. Poor Reality Winner, a loser in life when her sense of proportion crosses with national security. Too bad for the young thing. Too bad for us b

Random

The few chapters on Reality were wonderful! Everything else was disjointed with no purpose or clarity

just good journalism

Howley takes stories we're a little familiar with and provides excellent analysis of what they expose about the "deep state" and our own complicity in the "surveillance state".

Good performance, average story

The performance was great, but the story itself was a bit jilted and drawn out. I struggled through the second half.