Her Three Lives and Her Real Life

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I adore Cate Holahan. She’s a brilliant author, and a wonderful pal, and a fabulously thoughtful person, and and and and... terrific in every way.

And today, I’m just gonna let her talk.


Confronting Stereotypes in My Fiction

             by Cate Holahan


I used to keep extra diapers in my glove compartment. In retrospect, it wasn’t a great place for them. The space is for documents that must be quickly accessed in an emergency. However, as a young mom driving with both a six-month-old and a toddler my most common crisis was a blowout that didn’t involve tires. Hence the nappies next to the vehicle records.

My convenient storage place became anything but one morning as I took the kids to a mommy-and-me music class a mile or so away from my West New York, NJ, apartment. Two blocks from my home, I reached a stop sign, looked both ways and, seeing it was clear, turned left. Admittedly, I did not come to a complete stop.

Police lights flashed within seconds. I pulled over, removed my license from my wallet, and withdrew the packet where I kept my vehicle registration and insurance. Unbeknownst to me, there was another envelope in the glove compartment with the new insurance card which had arrived a couple days ago — hidden behind the diapers.

The officer rapped on my window. I handed over everything while my two-year-old asked questions and the baby wailed in the back. The officer saw the expired insurance card.

“This isn’t up to date,” he said.

I apologized. “It’s probably behind this diaper explosion.” I smiled while pointing at the Pampers in hopes that he might let a frazzled mom off with a warning. “Let me check again.”

“If you don’t have it, you’ll come down to the station, and we’ll take the car and these kids.”

The words rang in my ear: We’ll take these kids.

I don’t know how often moms are threatened with having their babies seized for rolling a stop sign and showing an expired insurance card. Maybe often. Maybe not. But I did find it odd that the officer said “these” rather than “your.”

In a split second, I became aware of a few facts that I knew but, until that morning, hadn’t thought much about. The first was that New Jersey had a significant undocumented population from South America and there had been news reports of local police contacting Immigration and Customs Enforcement after catching people for traffic offenses.

The second was that I don’t look like my kids. My girls are blonde, fair-skinned, and blue-eyed like their father and my Irish American dad. I have my Jamaican mother’s brown eyes, black curly hair, and a yellow-brown complexion that deepens to caramel with a little sun exposure, and I’d been incessantly walking with the stroller since spring.

Did this officer think I was an undocumented nanny? Or was he always this aggressive with moms? Would he really take my kids?

I didn’t know the answers. But I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere without my girls. “We live right there,” I said, pointing to the six-story building out the driver’s side window. “I get that I rolled a stop sign, and I am looking for my documents. I don’t understand why you are threatening to take my children.”

He never gave me a reason. But he left to run my license and insurance, which was up to date. His partner then returned to the window, slipped me a ticket for failing to come to a complete stop at the sign, and said that he hoped I had a nice day.

I can’t be positive that I was profiled that day. But that’s the thing about dealing with damaging stereotypes, people rarely can be certain when they’ve been targeted by one.

As a result, the onus is often unfairly placed upon the person who could be seen as fitting a negative stereotype to do everything in their power to dodge it—even when the hurtful assumption is based on perceived ethnicity and is therefore unavoidable.

It’s a minefield that I explore in my upcoming domestic suspense novel, Her Three Lives. In the book, protagonist Jade is a 32-year-old Jamaican-American blogger and designer, engaged to Greg, a 52-year-old white, well-to-do architect. She’s aware of the often rapped and sang about trope of Black women being gold diggers and is sensitive to how Greg’s adult children from his prior marriage may perceive her. This concern becomes top of mind after Greg suffers a traumatic brain injury during a home invasion and his kids seem to suspect her of being involved.

A good deal of the trouble comes from Jade’s attempt to conceal things that she fears could feed into this damaging stereotype. As a result, her awareness of the trope becomes almost as damaging as the actions of those who would make negative assumptions about her motives based on her age and race.

For days after the incident with the cops, I talked to my husband, wondering aloud if I’d misread what had happened and if there was anything that I might have done differently which would have resulted in a less harrowing experience. The diapers were removed from the glove compartment that evening. But I also began to dress more business casual with the kids in hopes of advertising that I was a working mom. At the playground, I added unnecessary suffixes to my kids’ names like, “darling daughter.” Sometimes, I dressed my kids like me.

I changed my behavior to avoid an unfair stereotype that, to this day, I can’t be sure I suffered. And that’s the pain of negative stereotypes. They become permanent, hovering dark clouds that might rain down at any moment. My darker skinned relatives worry that stereotypes concerning criminality and Black men could lead to unfair imprisonment and even death, even if they personally have not had negative encounters with law enforcement. 

My Asian American friends have expressed fears about people thinking they’re diseased or to blame for coronavirus based on their ethnicity. Early on during the pandemic, one of my Chinese American friends said she was nervous to wear a mask outside because people might assume that she was contagious and not that she, like most of us, was simply trying to be respectful of everyone else’s health.

When I write, my first goal is always to tell an entertaining, twisty story. But I also want to reflect the world we live in and, hopefully, encourage people to empathize with experiences that might be different from their own. I hope Her Three Lives might fuel a discussion of stereotypes that are out there and the constant pressure to circumvent them. 

In the end, I hope the story may encourage some people to think about the negative knee-jerk assumptions that they hold and perhaps work a little harder to remember that we’re all humans seeking to be seen as individuals.


HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Thank you thank you thank you. I love Jungle Red. I love that we get to be here, together, and talk. Anyone have anything to say?

(And a copy of HER THREE LIVES to one very lucky commenter!)

In USA Today bestselling author Cate Holahan’s new thriller HER THREE LIVES a family must discover who the real enemy is after a violent home invasion breaks their trust in one another.

Jade Thompson is an up-and-coming social media influencer, she has a beautiful new home and a successful architect for a fiancé and seems to have it all. But there’s trouble behind the scenes. To her husband Greg’s children, his divorce from their mother and his new life can only mean a big mid-life crisis. To Jade, her husband’s suburban Connecticut upbringing isn’t an easy match with her Caribbean roots.

A brutal home invasion leaves Greg house-bound with a traumatic brain injury and glued to the live feeds from his ubiquitous security cameras. As the police investigate the crime and Greg’s frustration and rage grow, Jade begins to wonder what he may know about their attackers. And whether they are coming back.

As Greg watches Jade’s comings and goings, he becomes convinced that her behavior is suspicious and that she’s hiding a big secret. The more he sees, the more he wonders whether the break-in was really a random burglary. And whether he’s worth more to Jade if he were dead.

Cate Holahan is the USA Today Bestselling author of domestic suspense novels The Widower’s Wife, One Little Secret, Lies She Told, and Dark Turns, all published by Crooked Lane Books.

Her fifth domestic suspense novel, Her Three Lives, will be published by Hachette Books' Grand Central Publishing in April 2021.

In a former life, she was an award-winning journalist, writing for CNBC, The Record, The Boston Globe, and BusinessWeek, among others. She was also the lead singer of Leaving Kinzley, an original rock band in NYC.

​She lives in NJ with her husband, two daughters, and food-obsessed dog, and spends a disturbing amount of time highly-caffeinated, mining her own anxieties for material.

​She is a member of The Author's Guild, Sisters-in-Crime, and Crime Writers of Color. She graduated from Princeton University in 2002.

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