My mom was still alive when I started writing The Three Lives of Cate Kay. In fact, I remember I wrote the first page, on a whim, while in West Stockbridge, Mass. My wife had an event down the road, and I was posted up at a local coffee shop, Six Depot Roastery. Since my mom lived about two hours away, she came to spend the afternoon with me.
I’d just finished writing for the day when she walked into the shop. We hugged and she sat across from me, and I immediately spun my laptop toward her and asked if she would read what I’d written. Below are those first few sentences, unedited, as she would have read them that day:
My first memory is me wearing my favorite Tom & Jerry shirt and wearing it every day for weeks without my mom noticing. I was a kindergartner, but it was summer, and my mom had convinced herself that since I was now technically in the public school system, she could leave me along as long as needed. There was even a socially acceptable term for this: a latchkey kid. This was her way of avoiding any responsibility for me.
Our relationship was nothing like the mom-daughter relationship I had portrayed on the page, so she took no offense to that. However, I had once been so obsessed with a Tom & Jerry shirt that my mom had begged me to wear other things. That day in the coffee shop, when she was done reading, she swiveled my computer back to me and said she loved what I had so far. Then she said something like, “Also, wow, Katie, you really can’t get that shirt out of your head, can you?”
No, mom, I can’t!
That t-shirt was this anchoring memory of my early childhood. Whenever I pictured something from this era (the late 80’s), I pictured myself in this shirt. And now here I was, decades later, writing a Tom & Jerry shirt onto my main character in the very first sentence.
I share this story because this personal detail was the first of dozens that I wove into The Three Lives of Cate Kay. And this happened, during the first draft of this book, without pre-meditation, probably because that’s just what most writers do when they build characters – they take the artifacts of their own life, the ones they can’t seem to shake, and they weave them into their narrative. In this way, a novel is often like a tapestry, sewed with the author’s deepest memories, their most vivid totems. After which they take on a life of their own.
Once I saw what I was doing, as the author of this book, I also saw an opportunity to have Cate Kay (my main character, also a writer) infuse her own books (book within a book!) with the unforgettable details from her own life.
So, I think Three Lives is about many things – ambition, love, desire, to name a few – but also, it’s a book about the details that stick with us throughout life. Some of these details are attached to emotional moments, and their permanence makes sense, while others seem so arbitrary that their persistence in our minds is curious.
A few weeks before my mom died, I asked if she could dig up our old albums and find some photos of me in that Tom & Jerry shirt. She texted over a bunch the next day; I share them with you here.
As you might imagine, Tom & Jerry means something different to me now than it did two years ago before I wrote this book, before my mom died. It’s my hope that reading The Three Lives of Cate Kay and the details woven throughout this book, will remind you of the ones you’ve held onto – perhaps without even knowing why.
I hope you enjoy.
