Exclusive: Read a Special Annotated Chapter of Kate Fagan's ‘The Three Lives of Cate Kay’

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Kate Fagan knows a thing or two about telling a good story. After all, she's already a #1 New York Times Bestselling author. But now she's telling a new kind of story in her first fiction debut that will absolutely mesmerize you as an author finally comes to terms of her own identity after many years of switching names. Ready to meet the real Cate Kay?

Cosmopolitan has an exclusive look at The Three Lives of Cate Kay, which is set to be released on January 7, 2025. After running away from her home and her identity, Cate is realizing that going back home might be the answer she needs to figure out more about herself and dealing with the very things she's been running away from. Here's some more info from our friends at Atria Books:

While we're still trying to figure out the mystery of the real Cate Kay, you can dive into an exclusive annotated chapter below. Just make sure you pre-order The Three Lives of Cate Kay and also check out some of Kate's other reads while you're at it!

An Excerpt From The Three Lives of Cate Kay
By Kate Fagan

RYAN¹

^{1. Note from Kate: My sister’s name is Ryan. I’ve always been slightly jealous of the uniqueness of her name. A girl named Ryan, how cool! My sister Ryan is nothing like this character Ryan Channing, but there was no chance of me writing a novel and not having a female character named Ryan.}

October 2006

Los Angeles

I’ve gotten too comfortable being Ry Channing, the movie star. It’s easy to be her. She is confident, poised, on top of the world. When I’m her, I feel those things. But Ry Channing isn’t a person; she’s a persona. And deep down I know these feelings are fleeting, a little dangerous. They camouflage a truth: that I feel best about myself when pretending to be someone else.

The real me is just a shy girl from Lawrence, Kansas², who loved wandering the museum as a kid³. Who still hates reading aloud (but loves reading silently) because the syllables play hopscotch in her mind and messing up is so embarrassing. Who has undiagnosed dyslexia⁴, itself a cruel word. Dick-lexia is how I can’t help but pronounce it⁵. And, particularly relevant to this endeavor, the girl who began mimicking Hemingway’s writing after reading The Sun Also Rises in high school. Simple sentences comfort me. Apologies in advance. I’ll try to break free a few times.

<sup>2. Note from Kate: My wife’s hometown. Rock-Chalk.
3. Note from Kate: A thing my wife (Kathryn) grew up doing.
4. Note from Kate: Also my wife.
5. Note from Kate: yes, this is often how my wife says dyslexia.</sup>

Don’t get me wrong, I also love the spotlight.

We contain multitudes.

When “Cate Kay” asked me to do this, I wondered which me to bring to the page. Shiny and glossy me, or braces and lisp me? My manager said she could have someone write my part if I wanted. That I could approve it after. But I found myself rejecting the idea as soon as she was forming the words. If I kept investing in the Ry Channing facade, soon I’d have to live inside it full-time. And that’s no place you want to be.

Trust me.

So, here we go. No ghostwriter. All me⁶.

^{6. Note from Kate: This entire first part, where Ry Channing is introducing herself and acknowledging her own insecurities, was inspired by – you won’t be surprised – my wife, who was a theater major at the University of Virginia. Before meeting Kathryn, I assumed all actors possessed preternatural confidence about being on stage. (No clue why I thought this.) So, as I was trying to figure out who Ryan was, deep down, I thought about this incongruity in Kathryn and I thought it would be interesting to give Ryan certain shades of it. Otherwise, though, my wife* is nothing like Ryan.
*Kathryn runs the imprint Inky Phoenix under start-up publisher Bindery. Her first title is Strange Beasts.}

I remember the moment it all started. I was in my trailer between scenes, which could sometimes take hours, when my agent called. His name was Matt. He told me he was having a book couriered to me.

“Give it a read,” he said. “The writing’s solid, but the story’s great and apparently the author, Cate Kay, is using a pseudonym and literally nobody knows who she is; it’s causing quite the tizzy. Everyone’s on fire for it—they’re billing it as ‘the beach-read version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road⁷.’ I think you should play Samantha.” I told him that tagline was the most Hollywood thing I’d ever heard, but that it sounded fantastic.

^{7. Note from Kate: I really, really wanted to use this tagline, so much so that I changed the timeline of the entire book, just slightly, to align with The Road’s 2006 publication date. Not sure it really mattered, but every time I read this sentence, I think about how the timeline of the book hinged on it.}

A moment later I heard a quick rap on my trailer door. A courier. He was scrawny, wearing an unclipped bike helmet. I glanced past him and around the set—we were in some small town outside Atlanta—and wondered where exactly the set security was. Not protecting me, that much was clear. I was, after all, fifth on the call sheet.

The movie that would change everything, Beneath the Same Moon, was three months from release. I was still that actor you had to snap your fingers and think hard to place. Oh yeah, the best friend from that one TV show. Then Same Moon came out. And after that it was shrieking fans and Oscar parties and endless scripts and me mostly taking refuge inside my Los Feliz bungalow.

But before that, in this small window of time, I was standing in the doorway of my trailer accepting a brown bag. I pulled out a hardcover book. The Very Last⁸. That now-iconic cover: half-black, half-tan⁹, the crumbling subway sign. What I liked about the cover is that it was clearly about something loud, but seemed to suggest it was going to tell you this loud story in a tender, nuanced way. And in stark lettering at the bottom, the author’s name. Just who was this Cate Kay?

^{8. Note from Kate: in 2019, while my dad was in his final months battling ALS, I wrote the entire manuscript of The Very Last, just as something to do in the hospital. It wasn’t good enough as a whole, but as I got deeper into writing The Three Lives of Cate Kay I started wondering if I could sample a few sections from that older manuscript and write through them. (That other book was also exploring the theme of ambition.)}

^{9. Note from Kate: This description is an homage to my dad, who loved a good black & tan. I think of him during this sentence and reference the beer later in the book.}

I opened the book, read the jacket copy:

“The world will remember their names.”

2000: Samantha Park and Jeremiah Douglas are best friends with a shared dream, to take TV news by storm. They’ve come to love working the graveyard shift together at American News Corporation. When the city explodes around them in a nuclear blast, they are the station’s only survivors. And so it falls to them to broadcast from the rubble, to tell the world the city’s story.

2025: Persephone¹⁰ Park never knew her mother. To everyone else Samantha Park is a fallen hero, to Persephone she is a black hole that cannot be filled. When Persephone, lost and drifting despite her inherited fame, hears of The Core she abandons her comfortable life immediately.

^{10. Note from Kate: If we ever had a daughter, my wife and I were going to name her Persephone, Sephe for short.}

Drawn to the site of her mother’s legend, she will join the group of outcasts seeking to build a life where the city used to stand...

I glanced to where the author photo and bio would be. No picture, just one sentence: This is Cate Kay’s debut novel.

By the time the assistant director called me to my next scene, I’d read two-thirds of The Very Last. I thought Matt had it wrong: I shouldn’t play Samantha Park. I should play Persephone, her daughter. I was intrigued by Samantha, her endless ambition and brave (or reckless) choices in the aftermath of the explosion. But the world Persephone inhabited lit up all my senses. She was such a perfectly drawn character. The mommy issues, the need to prove something to herself, the curiosity and wandering. I’d loved the cartoon Tom and Jerry as a kid¹¹. And there was Persephone pulling on a well-worn sweatshirt of the animated duo that I could imagine myself having worn. Plus, I was intrigued by the setting of The Core.

^{11. Note from Kate: I had a beloved Tom & Jerry shirt as a kid.}

I’ve heard journalists talk about the benefit of assignments in far-flung locales. How the story can write itself because of the unique backdrop. It can be like that for an actor. Find a character set in a distinct, interesting world and you, as an actor, can often find clearer, simpler ways to reflect their humanity¹². That’s how it had been for me, anyway. The reason my performance in Moon went to a new level was because of the intensity of the concept. Rogue scientists, far outside the system, testing potential cures on patients. What my role as Patient Zero didn’t need was for me to escalate and escalate and turn the thing into a B horror movie. Rather, I needed calm and discipline in the face of madness.

^{12. Note from Kate: I’ve spent nearly 20 years as a sports journalist, and I always found this to be true for me. I’ve written stories set in Russia, in China, and in Istanbul, and I always immensely enjoyed writing these pieces – felt like place was a main character, and all place required of you was your openness and attention. (Unlike people, who are much trickier.)}

I saw a similar opportunity in The Very Last. Seven Oscars and $4 billion in box office later and I think we can agree I was right about something.

“Persephone,” I told Matt, calling on my way to set. “Not Samantha. I want Persephone.”

“So, you like the book?” He seemed pleased with himself.

“The Core, it’s the richest setting I’ve read in a while,” I said.

“I agree, and it’s so visual, too: the rotting wooden boats they take through the water, the contamination zone, and that last subway stop. Damn—”

“Exactly why it needs to be Persephone,” I interrupted.

“But Samantha, she’s absolutely the lead in this,” he said. I knew he was thinking about how much more money the lead would make and how much bigger his cut would be as a result, but he would pretend it was about the creative. “Imagine the set building for her world, traversing a simmering and smoking Manhattan with a camera¹³. I mean, this is a character obviously motivated by ambition but hailed worldwide as a martyr. What a mindfuck. It’s so, so... allegorical.”

^{13. Note from Kate: when choosing a movie, I usually want the combined Rotten Tomatoes rating to be 140. That’s my go-to metric EXCEPT for apocalypse movies. Those I’ll watch regardless of their rating. Give ‘em to me! So, it’s no surprise that the book that Cate Kay ends up writing (and that I wrote myself five years earlier!) was apocalypse themed. I was taking the write the book you want to read idea a little too far.}

He loved using fancy words and acting like a movie’s social commentary mattered to him.

“It’s certainly parabolic,” I said. I wanted him to know I could play ball.

“But...?”

“I want Persephone.” To his credit, he didn’t hesitate, just said, “On it.”

And that was the first conversation I had about The Very Last. That one book would become a trilogy of books and a trilogy of films, and would break box-office records. But for me, the legacy of this cultural phenomenon had nothing to do with A-list or popularity or numbers. Whenever this project comes up, I think immediately of one thing. Or, rather, one person: Cass Ford, known to the world as Cate Kay.

And how she broke my hear¹⁴.

^{14. Note from Kate: when I first started writing this book, I was picturing Ryan as the French actress Fleur Geffrier, who I adored in the TV show Drops of God on Apple. But I’d say as the book progressed, I started to picture Ryan as just herself and not “like” anyone else.}

Adapted excerpt from The Three Lives of Cate Kay, Copyright © 2025 by Kate Fagan published by Atria Books¹⁵, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

^{15. Note from Kate: and edited by Laura Brown.}

The Three Lives of Cate Cay, by Kate Fagan will be released on January 7, 2025. To preorder the book, click on the retailer of your choice:

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