Singular, Stylish, Short: Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs

Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs: A Journey through the Deep State
Gretchen Sisson, 2024
223 Pages
City Library, 6/7 copies available; County Library, 2/2 copies available.
Used copies available on ThriftBooks

This perfectly modern author embraces journalistic nonobjectivity, absurdity, and orgininality of form. An unusual work, but with easy prose. I think it will be a great conversation starter. The title made most 2023 notable non-fiction lists and earned National Book Award finalist.

Publisher's Summary:
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.