This week's guest is the Emmy award-winning American journalist Kate Fagan.

Kate started out playing college basketball before making the move into sports journalism. She worked for the American cable channel ESPN (for brits, that’s THE sports channel in the US) and wrote the number 1 NYT bestseller, What Made Maddy Run. 

Then, just before she turned 40 and at the top of her professional game, Kate took a hard left. She stepped away from the career that made her famous, moved to Charleston and married her wife Kathryn Budig.

Now she’s written a novel The Three Lives of Cate Kay that pushes all the buttons. A dissection of success and ambition, and the true cost of living a lie, it was Reese Witherspoon’s first bookclub pick of the year. 

While Kate was on the Edinburgh leg of her book tour, she came to hang out in my flat and ply Sausage the cat with Dreamies (no cash has changed hands but he’s always open to a conversation!) 

While she was here we discussed the moment she was bitten by the ambition bug (and how she’s still struggling to shake it off), the lack of female sporting role models when she was a young athlete, coming out at 30 and The stories we tell ourself about what it means to be a successful human. We also chatted age dysmorphia, crossing the 40 threshold and the conversation she wishes she’d had with her mum. She also introduced me to the concept of TODs.

* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including The Three Lives of Cate Kay by Kate Fagan and the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.

* If you enjoyed this episode and you fancy buying me a coffee, pop over to my page on buymeacoffee.com.

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