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

The acclaimed author of Thrown looks at post-privacy America by focusing on the story of intelligence specialist Reality Winner, who served more than four years in prison for leaking a classified report.
"In Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, acclaimed essayist and author Kerry Howley reveals the inner workings of the U.S. intelligence community, uncovering a shadow America more fascinating and more unsettling than one could imagine. At the heart of her narrative, which encompasses "American Taliban" John Walker Lind, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, is a woman named Reality Winner. Reality becomes a crypto linguist for a government drone program, eavesdropping on private conversations until she hears information that she can no longer keep secret. Her decision to act on this knowledge leads to a disturbing series of events that ends with Winner sentenced to years in prison."--
A wild, humane, and hilarious meditation on post-privacy America—from the acclaimed author of Thrown"At 25, (Reality] Winner—yoga teacher, beloved sister, AR-15 owner—was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking classified documents about a Russian election attack. Howley deftly analyzes the brutal, surreal conditions that underlie this drama and the way that they implicate all of us.”—Glamour 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.