The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan
- Atria Books, 2025
- Hardcover, 304 pages
- ISBN 978-1-6680-7621-7
For years, the identity of bestselling author Cate Kay was a closely guarded secret; only two people knew the author’s real name. But we, the readers of this novel by Kate Fagan masquerading as a memoir by Cate Kay, know the truth from the opening pages:
Anne Marie Callahan —> Annie —> Cass Ford —> Cate Kay
“Creating a new life (or lives) takes a devastating amount of energy, of imagination. And I’ve missed hearing my real name” (p. 1), she tells us in the short foreword that sets the stage for what follows. “Within these pages, you will read about what happened from my perspective, as well as from those whose stories collided with my own” (p. 2). But this book is more than a memoir:
. . . it is a monument. Carved from a mass of bad decisions and selfishness and, it pains me to admit, cruelty. And yet, I want you to love me anyway. No use pretending otherwise. I’m done hiding who I am.” (p. 2)
Anne Marie begins her story with the summer before fourth grade, when she “caught the sickness of wanting to eat the world” (p. 5). She and her mother lived in a small apartment in Bolton Landing in upstate New York. Anne Marie was left on her own all day while her mother cleaned rooms at the Chateau, a fancy resort on the shore of Lake George. One sunny afternoon, while sitting on a bench outside the local ice cream shop, Anne Marie had an experience that “rewired [her] brain” (p. 7):
I was sitting on my bench when I looked up into an aqua sea. I visualized myself piercing through the blue, then through the ozone into outer space, then I imagined piercing outer space into—what? The though triggered a moment of pure derealization—that’s what I might call it now—and my body filled with this odd sensation of the universe is all there is; there’s nothing outside the universe. This wasn’t a feeling of atheism; it wasn’t about heaven; the closest descriptor is uncanny, if uncanny was on steroids. (p. 6)
After this moment “it felt like I’d swallowed a black hole and it demanded filling, somehow” (p. 6). “In the many years since, I’ve thought of this memory as a blueprint that might help explain the life I constructed afterward” (p. 7).
The universe responded later that summer, when Anne Marie met Amanda Kent at a theater camp run my the local high school. Nearly the same age, Anne Marie and Amanda soon bonded, and “my first gentle step toward a different life came when Amanda started calling me Annie” (p. 8).
Over the rest of their school years the two girls made plans to drive to Los Angeles after high school and become actors. By the time she graduated, Annie tells us, “What I craved was cosmic bigness” (p. 25). The night before they were to leave, a catastrophe occurred that separated the girls and sent Annie on the run.
And so begins the chain of experiences that turns Annie into Cass Ford and finally into Cate Kay. Annie and Cass pour their hearts out into a notebook that becomes the manuscript for the novel The Very Last. Pulled out of a publisher’s slush pile and released under the pseudonym Cate Kay, The Very Last becomes a phenomenal bestseller and then an equally popular film. Two sequels follow.
While all this unfolds, Annie undergoes more than enough experiences to fill three lives. She learns to deal with people who think they know better about how she should live her life than she does. And gradually she gains the self-confidence necessary to allow herself to become vulnerable, to let herself be known and loved by others as well as by herself. She learns enough about life’s big questions like trust, friendship, love, and freedom to figure out who and where she wants to be.
A few years ago I wrote about what I call “You Can’t Go Home Again” novels. The Three Lives of Cate Kay introduced me to the opposite: a novel featuring a protagonist who learns that, despite her dreams of “cosmic bigness,” for her, home is exactly the right place to settle down.
And just look at all the Life Stories in Literature patterns that this novel illustrates:
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
