The Three Lives of Cate Kay

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of mental illness and death by suicide.

Although The Three Lives of Cate Kay is Kate Fagan’s debut novel, she had already established a long career in writing prior to publishing this book. She is an Emmy-award-winning journalist who worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer and then for ESPN before moving to Sports Illustrated. She has also hosted her own podcasts and been a regular guest on others, and she has appeared many times on the television programs Around the Horn and First Take.

Her first full-length book was The Reappearing Act: Coming Out as Gay on a College Basketball Team Led by Born-Again Christians (2014), a memoir discussing her own experiences as a college athlete. Fagan, the daughter of basketball player Chris Fagan, played Division I basketball for the University of Colorado Boulder and professional basketball for the Colorado Chill. Fagan writes about her relationship with her father in All the Colors Came Out: A Father, a Daughter, and a Lifetime of Lessons (2021). Her father’s battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) inspired Fagan to become an advocate for others with ALS.

Additionally, Fagan was named a semifinalist for the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing for her 2017 book What Made Maddy Run: The Secret Struggles and Tragic Death of an All-American Teen, which focuses on University of Pennsylvania runner Madison Holleran’s depression and death by suicide in 2014. Fagan’s most recent work of nonfiction, published in 2024, is a collaboration with artist Sophia Chang and WNBA player Seimone Augustus, called Hoop Muses: An Insider’s Guide to Pop Culture and the (Women’s) Game.

In an interview with Evelyn Skye of the Creative, Inspired, Happy podcast, Kate Fagan explains that throughout her basketball career, she dreamed of being a writer (Skye, Evelyn. “Building a Career in Both Fiction and Non-Fiction with #1 New York Times Bestselling Author Kate Fagan.” Creative, Inspired, Happy. January 14, 2025). She turned first to sports journalism because it was a topic with which she was familiar. Although she did enjoy some aspects of sports journalism, her ambition was to write novels once she felt sufficiently established as a writer and had honed the necessary skills. Her decision to frame The Three Lives of Cate Kay as a memoir draws upon her experience with writing her own memoirs. She also feels that the novel’s narrative structure, with its many contributing voices, makes the story feel like a documentary—and therefore like a logical stepping-stone from her past in nonfiction into her future in fiction.

In the Skye interview, Fagan reveals that The Very Last, the novel-within-the-novel in The Three Lives of Cate Kay, is loosely based on an unpublished manuscript that she herself wrote years ago, when she was tending to her father in the hospital during his final days. She revised the manuscript significantly to make it fit Annie and Amanda’s story, but its central premise remains the same. Fagan currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina with her wife, Kathryn Budig. Fagan’s love for Charleston can be seen in her depiction of this setting in The Three Lives of Cate Key; it is here that Annie temporarily settles into a life of seclusion after her breakups with Sidney and Ryan.