Coco Mellors on why a sister is not a friend, grief and her sophomore novel
In the last two years, it's been impossible to walk past a tube advert that didn't have the now iconic cover of Coco Mellors' debut novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein plastered across it. And yet for English born Coco, the novelty still hasn't worn off, "I can't even begin to describe what an amazing feeling it was [seeing the posters], going around the tube stations with my sister that we used to go to as 13 year olds on our way to Claire's Accessories," she laughs over Zoom.
And no, Coco is not just being modest. The novel's success was a long time in the making. Having grown up in London as one of four siblings, Coco and her family moved to New York when she was 15 for her dad's job. She surprised everyone by staying on, and has spent the last two decades (with a brief stint in LA) in New York, where she began her career as a fashion copywriter while completing a Masters of Fine Art. The process of writing Cleopatra and Frankenstein took five years, as Coco worked on it on evenings and weekends before it was published in 2022.
While it's now in the early stages of production for a TV adaptation, racked up thousands of views on BookTok and been the discussion of many a book club, Cleopatra and Frankenstein was not an instant success. As Coco describes, there was no bidding war, and no early appearance on the New York Times bestseller list. Instead, it was down to the readers who discovered her that propelled the novel forward, and made it the book of summer 2022.
And now she's back with her new novel Blue Sisters, which tells the story of three very different female siblings scattered around the world, who come together on the anniversary of their fourth sister's death to sort her belongings and attempt to manage their grief.
Despite the added pressure, Coco is impressively cool and collected about the release of her new novel. She doesn't look at reviews, has never been on TikTok, and right now her biggest stress is managing writing her third novel (more on that later) while looking after her young son, Indigo.
Ahead of the release of Blue Sisters we caught up with Coco to hear who and what inspired the novel, how she tackles topics such as grief and endometriosis, and which of the Blue Sisters would be a certified Swiftie.
Cosmopolitan UK: Hey Coco, where did the idea for Blue Sisters come from?
Coco Mellors: Before I finished Cleopatra and Frankenstein, I was working as a copywriter and I was on a lunch break with a colleague. She was one of four sisters and she was saying how much she loved being one of four girls. She said, "If you don't know my sisters, you don't know me."
It struck me as quite a true statement about sibling-hood. And I began to think about, 'How have I been defined by where I am in the hierarchy of my siblings?' [Coco is the youngest of four]. There's a lot of attention paid to parents in terms of why we are the way we are, but I really think it's our siblings who play a huge role.
So I loved this idea of four sisters, and that magic number four, and I'm always interested in breaking something that's harmonious. So then I felt what if there were four sisters and they become three before the novel even opens? What does that do to the remaining three?
The first line in the book - 'a sister is not a friend' - resonated with me heavily, and I'm sure it will for other readers, too. Where did that line come from?
That line was always the opening of the book. I'm incredibly close with my sister Daisy [while Coco has three older siblings, she only grew up with one of her sisters at home] and we ended up in that kind of binary where she acted out, so I acted in and [if] she liked this, I liked that. And I realised as the younger sibling, I shaped a lot of my identity around the edges of her.
And she's just not a friend. If she was my friend we wouldn't be friends any more because we've gone through so much together. We've fought in way that you don't survive as friends.
It's a much stickier, more viscous, deeper relationship than I've ever had with a friend. But I've had some people disagree with it and say, "my sister is my best friend" and that's what I like about it, because it immediately gets you thinking.
Of the four sisters, did you have one you found more difficult to write?
Because Nicky is not present in a lot of the scenes, she was the hardest for me to get close to, just on a practical level. I really wanted her absence to be a presence. So it was important that we have a strong sense of her character even though she's died before the novel opens.
I loved writing Bonnie because I did more research for her character than any other character I've ever written. I trained with a boxing coach for a year and a half to write her, and I loved writing someone who had that contradiction, of being a master of this very violent sport, and yet she's so diplomatic, sweet and soft spoken.
Lucky is a character that frustrated me because I found her self destructiveness hard to write, but I really related to it from my own youth. And then Avery I relate to even though I'm not the oldest sibling. I'm definitely the baby. And like Avery, I've been sober for quite a long time, and I think the longer you stay sober, in my case, the more internalised pressure there is to behave in a certain way.
If each of the sisters was a song, what would they be?
Lucky has kind of a punk spirit, so maybe she'd be like a Siouxsie and the Banshees song. Nicky is pure, pure pop, I'm sure she would be a Swiftie.
Bonnie needs something kind of heavy metal to get her into the training spirit; I feel like she'd be listening to the Beastie Boys. And Avery probably wants to be a classical music song because she likes that it's rarefied. But the reality is Avery has a slightly punk past and maybe that would come out in her, so maybe something like a Bikini Kill song.
Slight spoiler alert: Nicky passes away after suffering from endometriosis. Why was it important to include that in the novel?
I thought for a long time about how and why Nicky would have died. And I think there is a big difference in losing someone who has been ill for a long time, where you've had time to begin to process the loss, and to lose someone very quickly and shockingly in way that they lose Nicky.
In my first book, I have a character that has epilepsy, and that was because my best friend has epilepsy and I have never seen in any work someone dealing with the realities of it in a way that wasn't defining their life, but it was in their life, and I felt endometriosis is quite a similar disease in some ways.
It's just such an example for me of how male-centred the medical industry still is today, and how much women are expected to endure physically.
It's a kind of lonely disease to be living with and I thought it felt true to this world that one of the sisters would have [endometriosis]. And then as I always do in my fiction, I tend to turn the dial up as far as it can go. I take something universal and take it to an extreme, but sort of hyper reality.
Grief is one of the biggest themes of the novel. How do you approach that in a way that doesn't fall into stereotypes or clichés?
In the moment I feel the characters, it's sort of like being an actor. I sink into them, and I feel how they're feeling and try to do my best to find a way to describe that.
When I wrote this book, my own experience in grief was fairly limited because I've been very lucky and actually had never lost anyone really close to me. My grandparents had died, and of course that was very sad, but it was also the natural order of how death should go in your life.
There's always something about when a death happens that's against the natural order. The most extreme and I think devastating, of course, being a child or a baby. It's not the way the life is meant to go. After I sold Blue Sisters I did another two drafts with my editors and [at the time] I got pregnant, and I had wanted to be pregnant and been trying for a long time. And then I miscarried and I was devastated.
One of the only things [about that experience] that felt redemptive, because it was so heartbreaking, was when I did the final few drafts of the book, I feel that experience of grief for me, although it's completely different type of loss, and I don't compare it and I don't think they're equal.
But there was something about the kind of shock and disappointment [of the miscarriage] and the sense of 'I'm different, but I have to keep living my same life' that I think seeped into the book.
I wanted to ask about the epilogue. I was surprised to see the novel wrapped up so neatly...
I added the epilogue as the very final thing. It wasn't the initial ending of the book. I had got pregnant again with my son Indigo and was on a run one day, and I had this vision of the sisters and what is now the ending of the book.
It just felt so right and so hopeful, at the end of a story which is so much about how do you find hope? How do you find a reason to keep going when something has happened that has made you lose faith in life?
If the book was adapted to screen, who would be your dream casting for the sisters?
I haven't thought about that one yet. When we were making the covers, I had to weirdly try to cast them because I was looking for paintings that looked like how I imagined them in my mind.
And I'm always really curious who readers see, because they see people that I would never have thought. Something I want to preserve in fiction is every single person has a different understanding of who these sisters are.
It's why I never really want to have photographs on my book covers. It's too prescriptive in terms of what the characters look like. I like paintings because they're a suggestion, but they're not an actual portrait of who that person is, it's more about capturing the feeling.
What can you tell us about your third novel?
It's set in Paris, in the hottest summer in Paris' history, about a woman deciding whether or not to have a child. Does she want to commit to her life as an itinerant artist, or to take on this more domestic version of life, by having a child with her partner? And she's meant to return home by the next time she ovulates to start trying this process.
And what are you reading right now?
I just read The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue, it really challenged me and I adored it.
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