Review of The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan

Cate Kay is a bestselling author--and a pseudonym used by a woman who's been running from her past for decades. Cate is at times a young dreamer, a haunted lover with a hardened heart, a wildly successful author dipping her toe in the world of Hollywood, and an imperfectly healed friend ready to face the future.

My friend Jenny mentioned this book to me, and I'd never heard of it but loved the premise. I was hooked the whole way through as I read.

The reclusive author Cate Kay has written a bestselling postapocalyptic trilogy (which is about to be made into a series of movies; meeting the star is a key part of the story later on), but Cate's extensive fan base has never seen her or even heard her voice.

That's because Cate Kay doesn't exist. When the writer was just out of high school, she was set for a big cross-country adventure and artist's life in LA with her best friend. But a tragedy the day before their planned departure changed everything--and led her to a newly imagined identity that she uses to shield herself from exposure and from vulnerability.

Cate's stories aren't front and center in the book, but through key references to them we find that the secretive, haunted author has attempted to work through the pain and complications of her past by fictionalizing elements of her personal history and using real details of her life in her novels. She shapes thrilling postapocalyptic stories around pieces of her own young, small-town, everyday life and the events that sent her on a trajectory of hiding and suffering.

The Three Lives of Cate Kay is built upon a gap in knowledge. It's necessary for the reader to sustain a suspension of disbelief so that this hole in our main protagonist's understanding feels at all plausible, and for the circumstances of the book and Cate's phases of identity to therefore exist and feel warranted. I typically strongly dislike a miscommunication plot point, particularly an extended one, but I didn't mind rolling with this one.

Fagan thrusts Cate into new situations, focuses on her all-encompassing evolution and development as an author, a lover, or a friend, and holds her past love and trauma over her, preventing her from understanding the full scope of her actual situation.

Then a shocking realization upends Cate's carefully curated life and shifts her understanding of all she has long known to be true.

I love a novel about a novelist. Cate evolves through the book: at first she's a big-hearted dreamer, then a devastated young woman, an obsessive writer with a shielded heart, a heartbreakingly vulnerable girlfriend, and finally, a wrecked human who manages to repair herself like she's Japanese Kintsugi pottery, full of cracks but rejoined and wonderfully imperfect.

I listened to The Three Lives of Cate Kay as an audiobook.

More about This Author

Kate Fagan is a former professional basketball player and ESPN journalist who wrote What Made Maddy Run and other nonfiction titles.