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.