The Secret Life

An award-winning author presents a trio of reports exploring the idea of identity on the Internet, where your virtual self takes on a life of its own outside of reality—Named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal.

“A riveting book. . . . To judge from Mr. O’Hagan’s arresting trio of portraits, society’s online twilight zone inspires both despair and humanity—often at the cost of truth and trust.” —The Wall Street Journal

The slippery online ecosystem is the perfect breeding ground for identities: true, false, and in between. In The Secret Life: Three True Stories, the essayist and novelist Andrew O’Hagan issues three bulletins from the porous border between cyberspace and IRL. “Ghosting” introduces us to the beguiling and divisive Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whose autobiography O’Hagan agrees to ghostwrite with unforeseen—and unforgettable—consequences. “The Invention of Ronald Pinn” finds him using the actual identity of a deceased young man to construct an entirely new one in cyberspace, leading him on a journey deep into the Web’s darkest realms. And “The Satoshi Affair” chronicles the strange case of Craig Wright, the Australian Web developer who may or may not be the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto—and who may or may not be willing, or even able, to reveal the truth.

What does it mean when your very sense of self becomes, to borrow a term from the tech world, “disrupted?” The Secret Life shows us that it might take a novelist, an inventor of selves, armed with the tools of a trenchant reporter, to find the answer.

“O’Hagan is an immensely engaging writer: wry and witty, and insightful. . . . These are ultimately human stories, and O’Hagan tells them superbly.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“Three fascinating strange-but-true tales of the Internet age. The first—O’Hagan’s hilariously frank account of his short-lived career as Julian Assange’s ghostwriter—is worth the price of admission.” —Esquire