The Three Lives of Cate Kay

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of addiction and emotional abuse.

Throughout the text, Fagan considers the many ways in which people create external representations of their inner experiences and twist the truth to fit their goals or conceits, and the book’s status as metafiction is also a significant part of this motif. As a pretended memoir, the entire novel poses existential questions about the “reality” of even nonfiction memoirs, deliberately blurring the line between “real” and “pretend” people. For example, Annie invites others to share her role as narrator, ostensibly giving them the space to accurately represent themselves, but “Cate’s” footnotes dispute the veracity of many of their statements. This scenario introduces an element of comic irony, for even “Cate Kay” is a performance of identity—a false persona—that seeks to become the arbiter of truth by vetting the claims of people who are considered to be “real” within the world of the novel.

An additional layer of irony lies in the novel’s self-consciously metafictional framework, for even these supposedly “real” people are in fact fictional from the perspective of Kate Fagan’s readers. Thus, Fagan uses these many layers of identity to suggest that even real-world memoirs are fictionalized to an unknown degree. From this perspective, there is really no way to know just how authentic and faithful to the truth Annie’s own “tell-all” memoirs really are. Even if her intent is to come clean about her life, the very act of rendering her experiences in words makes her vulnerable to “performing” her identity for an audience all over again.

Within this multilayered framework, the events recounted throughout the novel are also designed to suggest that individuals often “perform” versions of themselves—both for personal gain and for the benefit of others. Although Annie’s friendship with Amanda is authentic, Annie also believes that their relationship is an “art form” (9), and this idea reinforces the focus on performance that dominates her attempts to invent herself anew in the eyes of others. As the girls become preoccupied with acting and use it as the basis for their relationship, they plan their mutual future around a dream of going to Los Angeles to act, imagining a fictionalized version of their friendship playing out in film after film. Eventually, a covert dispute over which is the better actor drives a wedge between the two. Each ends up acting out a role for the other in real life, and their pretense that nothing is wrong between them undermines the intimacy at the foundation of their relationship.

Acting comes up again in Ryan’s chosen profession, which demands that she constantly inhabit artificial representations of herself—both professionally and personally. Although Ryan initially enjoys the work, she eventually wearies of inhabiting other versions of herself when she is playing a role in a film. As time goes on, she begins to want to leave this vocation behind and try her hand at directing instead—thereby seizing control of the performance rather than becoming its object. Similarly, Ryan’s pretense of denying her authentic identity as a lesbian is something that she initially views as a slightly bothersome professional necessity, but it later becomes an intolerable burden. This dynamic echoes the course of Annie’s repeated assumption of new identities; as she mutates from Anne Marie to Annie to Cass to Cate, each new projected version of herself initially feels necessary—even liberating—but later becomes burdensome. Thus, the novel’s focus on performed identities supports the idea that although such subterfuge serves an immediate need, these misrepresentations of one’s inner truth can become problematic—both for the self and for others.