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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
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Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo meets First Lie Wins in this electric, voice-driven debut novel about an elusive bestselling author who decides to finally confess her true identity after years of hiding from her past.
Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she's one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn't really exist. She's never attended author events or granted any interviews. Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now.
As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes and moving to California to become movie stars. But the day before their grand adventure, a tragedy shattered their dreams and Cate has been on the run ever since, taking on different names and charting a new future. But after a shocking revelation, Cate understands that returning home is the only way she'll be a whole person again.
Excerpt
The Three Lives of Cate Kay
February 27, 2014
Charleston, SC
About a year ago, a FedEx package landed on the porch of my home in Charleston, South Carolina. I don't get much personal mail, a consequence of multiple name changes, I guess.
A saga, actually—my name. I've had too many. I was born Anne Marie Callahan, but growing up, my best friend called me Annie. A few years later, I legally changed it to Cass Ford. Then, I published under the pseudonym Cate Kay. I wish it was simpler. Trust me, I do. Creating a new life (or lives) takes a devastating amount of energy, of imagination. And I've missed hearing my real name.
So, this FedEx box was an anomaly in my world. I glanced at the return address: Mason, Cowell & Collins, the law firm of Sidney Collins. Not only was Sidney the architect of my literary empire—manager of all things Cate Kay—she was also my ex-girlfriend.
I carefully opened the box. Inside was a stack of blue binders and sitting atop was a handwritten note from Sidney. She explained that by sending over all this paperwork, she was relinquishing control of my Cate Kay business dealings and righting past wrongs. (One of them, anyway.) What she couldn't have known was that this package, and her letter, set in motion a series of events that would forever alter the trajectory of my life.
She signed it: I'll think of you—fondly. xo, Sidney. I was glad her tone was conciliatory. Sidney is not someone I want as an enemy. Or, really, as a friend. No relationship at all was my preference. We hadn't spoken in seven years—not since the long-ago night when I'd frantically taken a red-eye from Los Angeles to the apartment the two of us shared in Harlem.
But let's not get started down that path; let's stick with the binders.
Before I closed the last one, I caught sight of a second handwritten note on crisp stationery. The letterhead belonged to my literary agent, Melody Huber. The note was addressed to me, dated four years prior. I read Melody's words with great curiosity. She gently invited me to come out of hiding. Her idea: a memoir. She'd suggested this previously, no doubt, but the message never reached me. The success was mine, she wrote, even if the name was not.
I looked at her words. A memoir? I liked the thought of it—of freeing myself. But I knew it couldn't happen. A book would requiremme to confront my past, which I was committed to not doing. Maybe someday I would feel differently, but not anytime soon.
Then, a week later, everything changed. And Melody's words had stayed with me:
You could tell everyone the full story, every little detail.
My mind kept catching on that last clause: every little detail. I remembered so many. They flooded my mind, a kaleidoscope—of sunbeams, of brown hair tossed, us blowing into our hands for warmth. Maybe Melody was right? Maybe it was time. I called her office and for the first time ever, heard the voice of the woman who had plucked my manuscript from the slush pile all those years ago.
I told Melody on that first phone call that I couldn't be the only one to tell this story. I'd lived inside it for far too long. Better to throw open the windows and tell it from every angle, for better or worse. Within these pages, you will read about what happened from my perspective, as well as from those whose stories collided with my own.
And that is how we got here, to this book you now hold in your hands. My memoir, but more than that—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. My mind's long been divided on the question of my goodness—and now here you are, the deciding vote.
I ask only that you read with an open heart.
Annie Callahan
aka Cass Ford
aka Cate Kay
...
Excerpted from The Three Lives of Cate Kay, Copyright © 2025 by Kate Fagan published by Atria Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Hundreds of years ago, William Shakespeare asked the question, What's in a name? Is the role we're destined to play in the world decided for us at birth, or can we rewrite the script with a new character, one that we create for ourselves?
One day, the reclusive, pseudonymous author Cate Kay, whose trilogy The Very Last—"The Road, but a beach read!"—catapulted her to fame, receives a box in the mail from her lawyer. In that box are pieces of a story, Cate's story. Pieces that change everything she thought she knew about the greatest tragedy in her life. As she starts to fit them into place and learn the truth about her past, she realizes that she needs to share her story—and her identity—with the world. But to do that, she'll need to revisit the people and places she's worked to distance herself from and to confront the three women whom she has loved and left behind.
Kate Fagan's stirring novel takes the form of a tell-all memoir that Cate writes to come clean about who she is. Various chapters are given over to other people she's met throughout her life, so that they can tell their version of events, some only for a few pages: the owner of the coffee shop she worked at as a teen; the agent who saved her novel from the slush pile; the reporter desperate to learn her real identity. These chapters are peppered with footnotes from the sardonic Cate, who is quick to correct the record when someone she's asked for a story or perspective gets the facts wrong. Even the smallest characters are given vivid and unique voices.
But the largest focus is on the three different women who each knew and loved a different version of Cate. The first is her childhood best friend, the charismatic, beautiful Amanda, who knew Cate by her real name, Annie. "What you need to know about me and Amanda is that no friendship like ours had ever existed," Cate writes. As teens, Annie and Amanda dream of getting out of their small town and making it big in Hollywood, becoming household names, leaving their mark on the world. But their relationship is unhealthy and codependent; neither girl knows how to exist without the other, and the friendship that once saved Annie's life has become claustrophobic and untenable. When a horrible accident leaves Amanda on the brink of death and Annie runs for help, she takes the opportunity to make a desperate bid for freedom, leaving her old life and Amanda behind.
Annie then reinvents herself for the first time; she calls herself Cass and meets the intoxicating, calculating Sidney, a law student who is instantly obsessed with her. Under the guise of helping Cass, Sidney returns to Cass/Annie's home and learns that Amanda is partially paralyzed and emotionally destroyed by her friend's disappearance. Convinced that Cass will return to Amanda if she finds out, Sidney tells Cass that Amanda has died. Sidney clings to Cass with desperate neediness. "Anytime she offered me her full attention, I felt like one of those magic sponge animals—just add water—that instantly and rapidly expanded," Sidney confesses. "The fullest, most powerful version of myself."
Cass doesn't feel the same way about Sidney, but also can't refuse her. Their relationship is one-sided and purely physical for Cass, who also uses the security that Sidney offers to write her first novel—the novel that makes her famous and prompts her second reinvention: Cate Kay, literary sensation.
Cate refuses interviews or publicity of any kind, determined to protect her anonymity. But when Ryan Channing, the beautiful and gifted actress chosen to bring Cate's books to the screen, requests a meeting with her, Cate agrees without entirely knowing why. Their attraction quickly blossoms into love, although the two are forced apart—Cate by the conniving Sidney, now her lawyer, who convinces her that Ryan has betrayed her identity; and Ryan by her management team, who fear that coming out as gay will derail her career. Once again, Cate abandons the woman she loves.
The romance between Cate and Ryan is at the heart of the novel. "Cass, this is real. We are real," Ryan writes to Cate. "I know because, somehow, you're in all my memories—even the ones from before we met." In this way, The Three Lives of Cate Kay is a love story, one in which Cate must find the strength to correct her mistakes and return to the people she left behind in order to accept that love, to feel that she deserves it, and to live honestly as herself.
Fagan taps into various genres, intertwining them into one book to a wonderful effect: The Three Lives of Cate Kay moves seamlessly between the breath-catching eroticism of Sidney and Cate's twisted affair and the charming romance of her relationship with Ryan. The exploration of Cate's tragic relationship with her negligent, alcoholic mother is great family drama, and the teenage adventures of two devoted best friends who dream of escaping their hick town are pure comedy. But ultimately, it's the story of personal growth and identity that rings truest. Fagan's novel is a beautiful bildungsroman that explores the many masks we wear throughout our lives and how we may find the strength to take them off. It is a novel about the courage it takes to truly own the choices we make, to stare our mistakes in the face and attempt to rectify them. It is a work of beauty, romance, and humor that celebrates the deep bonds of friendship and love between women.
Reviewed by Sara Fiore
Emiko Jean, New York Times bestselling author of The Return of Ellie Black
Emily Habeck, USA Today bestselling author of Shark Heart
Laura Hankin, author of A Special Place for Women
I've joked on more than one occasion that, should I ever write a novel of my own, it will have to be under a pseudonym to save myself from the ire of all the real people I'll be turning into fiction. Many famous and acclaimed writers have used a pseudonym (also known as a pen name, nom de guerre, and nom de plume). The name Mark Twain is infinitely more well known than Samuel Clemens, his real-life counterpart. The French novelist George Sand used her male pseudonym to publish and to advocate for women's rights in 19th century France. Louisa May Alcott used multiple aliases—the most famous being "A.M. Barnard"—because they allowed her to write about more controversial subjects and in "lurid" genres, unlike the domestic fiction she was known for.
But an author hiding their true identity can also backfire. In The Three Lives of Cate Kay, Annie Calahan uses the name Cate Kay to publish a bestselling trilogy and also to reinvent herself after a terrible mistake she made as a young girl. The novel is presented, in part, as her decision to abandon anonymity, acknowledge her mistakes, and live openly again as Annie. This works out for Annie, but not every author in the real world has been as fortunate.
When Benjamin Franklin was sixteen, he wrote a series of essays for the New-England Courant, which his own brother published. Franklin knew that his brother wouldn't publish his byline, so he submitted them under the pen name Mrs. Silence Dogood, an alleged widowed wife of a minister. His essays became very popular among readers, and he published fourteen of them before confessing that he was the writer. His subterfuge annoyed his brother, who told Ben that the readers' compliments had made him vain, and resulted in a lasting rift.
Some authors have gone so far as to create entire lives for their pseudonyms. There may be none more elaborate than Stephen King's alter ego Richard Bachman. Begun as a way to give himself more creative freedom (and perhaps to allow him to publish more frequently), Bachman was endowed with an elaborate backstory, including a wife, a job as a dairy farmer, and a very unlikeable personality (probably due to the facial deformity he had as a result of a childhood illness). King admitted that he was Richard Bachman in 1985—after a book seller picked up on similarities between the two writers—and soon after that, Bachman passed away from "pseudonym cancer."
It's understandable that following the stunning success of her Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling would choose to publish her next series under a pseudonym, especially because the new, more grown-up series followed a hardened private detective solving gruesome murders. Writing as Robert Galbraith, she released The Cuckoo's Calling in 2013. Rowling was outed almost immediately by her own lawyer, who revealed her identity to a friend; the resulting media blitz shot the book up the bestseller list. Many believed that the entire episode was a well-orchestrated publicity stunt, although the law firm denied it and took full responsibility. More recently, it was noted that Rowling's pseudonym, Galbraith, shares the name of a controversial conversion therapist; although Rowling says that her pseudonym was not named for him, people see a connection between her pen name, a plotline in one of her pen name's novels in which a male serial killer disguises himself as a woman, and Rowling's own transphobic views.
Finally, sometimes no one wants the curtain to be lifted. Beloved Italian author Elena Ferrante's true identity is a mystery even to her translator, but very few people are anxious to learn who she truly is. Despite numerous attempts to unveil her and several bombshell articles claiming to have learned her real name, fans and fellow authors have almost universally come to her defense, citing her right to privacy. The editor in chief of Ferrante's publisher says that any interest in Ferrante's real identity is "a media creation… It's a great story for the media, but in most cases, for a large number of readers, they're more interested in the books."
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Filed under Books and Authors
By Sara Fiore
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