Kate Vaiden (1986) is the 6th novel by American author Reynolds Price. The novel focuses on the life of a white woman from the American South who, after a teenage pregnancy, abandons her son shortly after giving birth to him and who does not get in touch with him for four decades. Plot summary Kate Vaiden is the first person narrator of the novel. When she sets out to tell the story of her life, she is a 57-year-old single woman. Having been diagnosed with cervical cancer seems to have changed her attitude to the family she left when she was seventeen without so much as writing them a letter—ever. Accordingly, she does not even know whether her son Lee, who must now be approaching 40, is still alive or not. In the final part of the book, which is set in 1984, she meets one of the last surviving members of her family, her cousin Swift, in a local nursing home. Swift eventually informs Kate that her son is alive and well but abroad with the US Navy. Kate's story Kate is born in 1927 and grows up as an only child in Greensboro, North Carolina with her young parents Dan and Frances Vaiden. Her happy childhood is suddenly interrupted when, in 1938, for reasons she can never quite fathom, her father shoots her mother and then himself, leaving her to be raised by her aunt and uncle, Caroline and Holt Porter. The Porters, whose grown-up sons no longer live at home, reside in Macon, and Kate takes some time to get used to living in a small village. As they are not farmers, Kate does not have to work for them after school or during the holidays. Over the years, Noony Patrick, the Porters' African American household help, becomes her only friend and confidante. Kate has her first sexual encounter surprisingly early in life—at the age of twelve, without having had any sex education. One summer afternoon down by the Roanoke River, Gaston Stegall, the neighbours' boy, shows her his erection, and she gives him a handjob, without really knowing what she is doing. {{quote| Gaston said "He hurts me." I said "How did you figure out it's a boy?" I stepped back a little. But he said "Oh don't. You can help me out." With all its faults, my family were not known for turning down pleas