BookBrowse Reviews The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan

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Before she can find love and happiness, a reclusive author must confront her painful past and face the women she has loved and abandoned.

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.

This review first ran in the February 12, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.