The movie Winner, co-written by Kerry Howley, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend. The movie tells the tale of Reality Leigh Winner, an NSA translator who leaked a report about Russian interference in the 2016 election and wound up sentenced to more than five years in federal prison for it. Deadline called it “an eye-opening portrait of an accidental anarchist.”
“By no means as controversial as previous whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange — all she did really was photocopy a piece of paper and send it to a fringe-left website — Reality Winner somehow became a punching bag for the American government,” writes Deadline‘s Damon Wise.
Winner is also at the center of Howley’s 2023 book Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs, which is Feminists for Liberty’s first book club pick of 2024. Our Bottoms Up book club session starts on February 4th.
“Howley got to know Winner and her family, depicting a young woman who ‘took ideas in their fullness, ignorant of their social context, and therefore radically open to argument.’ Winner worked as a translator for the drone program while teaching yoga and worrying about global warming,” notes a New York Times review of the book from last year. “‘She was not on a team,’ Howley writes. The book suggests it was this — the fact that nothing Winner did was easily amenable to the narrative of a particular side — that eventually did her in.”
The book—subtitle “A Journey Through the Deep State”—also goes beyond Winner, focusing on “privacy and its absence; about hiding and leaking and secrets and betrayal,” as the Times put it. “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.”
Want to join us this February in reading and discussing Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs? Sign up for the Feminists for Liberty book club on the book clubs app to get notified about our (virtual) meetings and participate.
