The Three Lives of Cate Kay

“What you need to know about me and Amanda is that no friendship like ours had ever existed. We basically redefined the medium, elevated it to an art form.”

Annie’s hyperbole whimsically acknowledges both her youthful feeling of exceptionalism and her adult understanding that the feeling she and Amanda shared is a very common experience. While her metaphorical comparison of the relationship to “art” is a part of this hyperbole, it is also nod to her lifelong habit of performing multiple identities—often to her own detriment.

“[Make] your outside match how you feel on the inside.”

The young Amanda is portrayed as a confident person whose sense of style is widely admired. While Annie finds Amanda’s advice about clothing to be initially confusing, this philosophy introduces the novel’s central preoccupation with The Gulf Between Public and Private Selves and foreshadows Annie’s decision to fragment her authentic identity into several different pieces. Later in life, as Annie becomes more aware of who she really is, she will be better able to put Amanda’s early advice into practice.

“Everyone was stunned. Who, in fame-hungry America, doesn’t come drink from the hose when beckoned?”

Ryan’s wry tone and exaggerated metaphor, in which she compares fame to water gushing from a hose, both combine to convey her belief that fame satisfies a natural need, just as water satisfies thirst; however, the degrading image of being “beckoned” also indicates that people seek fame in the same ignominious fashion that a desperately starving person might beg for sustenance and submit to all manner of indignities in order to obtain it. Ryan believes that the American craving for fame is so deep that people will eagerly ignore its harmful aspects. Her reflections therefore support the thematic exploration of Seeking Fulfillment in the Wrong Places.

“The beginning of everything came a moment later.”

Annie calls the moment that the zipline detached from its mooring “the beginning of everything,” for although this moment marks the end of Annie and Amanda’s friendship—at least for many years—and the end of Annie’s identity as “Annie,” it is also the exact moment that launches Annie’s independent life. It is the beginning of her life as “Cass Ford,” the woman whom she will become without Amanda.

“I was in a unique kind of agony. Like I’d had a heart transplant and was waiting to see if it would take. I wanted a new chance at life so badly. And also, I was terrified that I would get it.”

The simile in which Annie compares her time in Plattsburgh to the limbo felt by someone waiting to see if a heart transplant will succeed conveys both her pain and her feeling that this move away from Amanda has life-and-death consequences. In order to establish an identity separate from Bolton Landing and Amanda, she is trying to trade the “heart” of one identity for another so that she can begin life anew as Cass Ford.

“Releasing her from the albatross of Amanda—that would be my gift to her. She would have true freedom. With me.”

Sidney metaphorically compares Amanda to an “albatross,” making an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” in which the albatross becomes a symbol of the burden of guilt and shame that drags a person down to their doom. By labeling Amanda as Annie’s albatross, Sidney sees the situation only from her own perspective and assumes that what she wants is in everyone’s best interests. She wants Annie all to herself, so she rationalizes that her lie about Amanda is not really a mean-spirited attempt to manipulate and trap Annie. By deluding herself into believing that he is freeing Annie from her guilt and shame, Sidney illustrates The Cost of Manipulation Within Relationships.

“I swear, this is when fear started seeping into my bones, when the pieces started to slide together… How big and scary this must be to have chased her away.”

When Kerri tells Amanda that Annie is missing, Amanda does not worry for a second that something has happened to Annie. She knows Annie so well that her immediate assumption is the correct one—that Annie has run away from Amanda’s situation. This is when she first realizes that her condition is serious—not from her own bodily feelings but from Annie’s reaction.

“She was with me, always.”

Despite Sidney’s wish that Annie will move on and focus her attention on Sidney instead of on Amanda, this has not taken place. Annie continues to be consumed with thoughts of the friend whom she believes is gone forever, and her unrelenting grief creates a gulf between her and Sidney that Sidney grows to bitterly resent.

“I could feel her affection dimming… and I had become desperate. Stupid, reckless, trying to be the… version of myself… I thought she loved most.”

In this passage, Amanda takes responsibility for her own accident, admitting that it happened because she was trying to show off for Annie in order to keep her close. This inner realization demonstrates The Cost of Manipulation Within Relationships and creates a form of dramatic irony. In the literal sense, Annie is aware of Amanda’s perspective even before her readers are, because as Cate, she is editing and compiling the narratives that make up her memoir. However, in the year 2000, when Amanda is actually experiencing the feelings that she describes here, the younger version of Annie is entirely unaware of her friend’s revelation. The irony stems from the fact that knowing about Amanda’s motivations would make a real difference in the shame that Annie feels over her own spontaneous decision to abandon Amanda.

“Cass. There it was. Cate Kay’s real name was Cass.”

This moment, which feels so significant to Ryan, creates a keen sense of dramatic irony, given that Fagan has already revealed that Cass’s “real” name is Annie. Because Ryan has already stated in Chapter 6 that Cass is the woman who causes her extreme pain and heartbreak, any positive developments that stem from this moment will remain tainted with the expectation of additional conflict. The subterfuge that still lies between the two women also raises implicit questions as to when Ry will learn of Annie’s true backstory.

“You’re what I want.”

Annie’s words to Ryan are not just significant as a confession of momentary desire; they are also the continuation of an earlier conversation in which Annie and Ryan have both discovered that they yearn for something grand to fulfill them on a cosmic scale. When Annie tells Ryan “You’re what I want,” she is naming Ryan as something that is immense enough to fill the emptiness that has plagued her since childhood.

“In my profession you learn that people are always building a web of lies around a kernel of truth and calling it honesty—it’s transparent.”

Sidney’s commentary shows her awareness of The Gulf Between Public and Private Selves. Unlike most people, Sidney is both shrewd and coldly pragmatic enough to see through public appearances and confront the private realities behind them, regardless of how the truth impacts her personally.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry… She’d been in love with me—for years. But instead of letting her go, sharing her with someone else, I’d done just enough to keep her: a hand on the cheek, a kiss on the forehead, a too-long hug.”

For the first time, Amanda is able to admit to herself that she did more than show off in order to keep Annie close to her. She deliberately manipulated Annie’s romantic attraction to her. The repetition of the phrase “I’m sorry” emphasizes her shame and guilt, reinforcing The Cost of Manipulation Within Relationships and representing significant progress in Amanda’s willingness to focus on Owning Mistakes and Seeking Forgiveness.

“I’d abandoned my best friend, lost her forever, for what? To not discover who I am?”

At dinner with Ryan, Annie has the crushing realization that whether her relationship with Ryan is real, it is yet another iteration of a self-defeating pattern that she inflicts upon herself. For years, she has lived in Sidney’s world, in the world of her novel, and in Ryan’s world, but, ironically, she has still never explored her own world.

“I hadn’t foreseen this response from her—crestfallen—so I was slow to react, distracted by how satisfied I was to have won.”

Sidney is not empathetic enough to anticipate that Annie will be crushed by the end of her connection with Ryan. Once again, she makes the error of thinking that Annie will be grateful for Sidney’s help. She is insightful enough about her own behavior to understand that her main interest is in “winning,” as if their relationship is a competition, but she is unable to understand the degree to which her actions have harmed Annie.

“I was always looking for ways to wring myself out, hoping I could sweat out the guilt and pain of what I’d done to Amanda.

Some days, I believed I had.”

Annie metaphorically compares herself to a cloth or sponge and likens her shame to a liquid that is trapped within it. She uses her long walks in the heat of Charleston to purge herself of this shame. For the first time, Annie is actively working on understanding herself and what she wants from life. Her progress in ridding herself of her guilt shows that this is her first step toward Owning Mistakes and Seeking Forgiveness.

“The second read was an entirely different experience.”

Just when Annie is in Charleston, working through her feelings about Amanda, Amanda begins a second read of The Very Last. Her comment that this experience is “entirely different” from her angry first reading foreshadows her forgiveness of Annie and their eventual reunion.

“Imagine me reading a tidbit in some magazine then calling Janie to vent, only to have her tell me the rhyme and reason behind its placement and me feeling woozy at how blurry the line is between the real me and the fake me.”

When Ryan confronts the misinformation about her life that appears in celebrity gossip media, she learns that the misinformation is often deliberately planted by her own team. This manipulation of her public identity illustrates The Gulf Between Public and Private Selves and demonstrates how damaging such a disconnect can be to a person’s sense of identity.

“[D]epending on your perspective, Persephone Park was either watching the last sunset of her old life or the first of her new one. Me, I think she was living in both, one last time.”

Persephone’s situation functions as an allegory for both Ryan’s and Annie’s. Ryan’s life is transitioning because she has just publicly revealed that she is a lesbian; her old life of hiding her sexuality is coming to an end, and she is leaving behind years of portraying Persephone—her final tie to Annie—and moving into new roles. As Annie watches Ryan and thinks of Amanda, she is simultaneously inhabiting two different parts of her life, but because she believes her relationship with Ryan is over, this final visit to watch Ryan on set feels like Persephone’s “one last time.”

“I’ve never let myself fully relive this memory before… No doubt my brain’s way of protecting me from feeling… like a bomb of regret has exploded all over me and no amount of scrubbing could ever remove the stain.”

Patricia makes it clear that her sobriety has forced her to reckon with her past mistakes. She deeply regrets her emotional neglect and abuse of Annie, and she worries that there is no way to fix this aspect of her life. This passage marks a key moment for her and develops the novels focus on Owning Mistakes and Seeking Forgiveness.

“I hoped, I hoped so dearly, that she meant that even though our love hadn’t been perfect, that it had been beautiful in its own way. Broken things are beautiful.”

After Carl finishes reading Annie’s novel to his dying wife, Charlene, she says that the characters are Seeking Fulfillment in the Wrong Places. Since Charlene was once filled with grand ambitions just like these characters, Carl desperately hopes that this is her way of telling him that their marriage turned out to be fulfilling for her in ways that her other ambitions would not have been. Carl’s narrative foreshadows the mending of Annie’s broken relationships and suggests that they will be beautiful and fulfilling.

“An earthquake rumbled through me. I pictured it rippling through the hotel floor, the surrounding skyscrapers, the miles beyond. Amanda, alive.”

The metaphor in which Annie compares her emotions to an earthquake captures the seismically momentous nature of her discovery that Amanda is alive. This revelation shifts the foundation of what she believes to be true about her world, changing everything for her.

“I cut the engine, and when I did, I cut whatever invisible thread was tethering me to the alternate universe, and that was fine with me.”

Annie’s sees her return to Bolton Landing as more than an ordinary homecoming. The many years that she has spent away from Amanda and her hometown feel like an “alternate universe,” as if reality split in two when she left. Now, she has come home to her proper place: the timeline that she was really meant to inhabit all along. The metaphor of the invisible thread being cut indicates that this return is permanent, and that Bolton’s Landing and Amanda are part of Annie’s “universe” again.