After ‘Cleopatra & Frankenstein’ Success, Coco Mellors Explores Sister Dynamics in ‘Blue Sisters’
In many ways, Coco Mellors found sudden success with her debut novel, “Cleopatra and Frankenstein.” The book, released in 2022, became a national bestseller and a TV adaptation from Warner Brothers is in the works — yet it took the writer five years to complete and get the book sold, making it feel like a much longer process.
Over the last two of those years, she was at work on her next book, which has finally arrived on shelves. “Blue Sisters” follows three estranged sisters — Bonnie, Avery and Lucky, each living separate lives in separate cities — who reunite after the death of their fourth sister, Nicky, when they learn their parents plan to sell the New York apartment where they grew up.
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“I knew I wanted to write about siblings, I wanted to write about sisters,” says the London-raised, New York-based author. “I was very inspired by something that a friend of mine, who’s one of four sisters, had said to me: if you don’t know my sisters, you don’t know me. And so I really loved this idea of we’re so defined by our siblings and by our birth order within a family.”
The Blue sisters “came to me almost like babies in a basket dropped on my doorstep,” Mellors says.
“They were so fully formed and they were so distinct from one another. It’s almost like the Powerpuff Girls: they had their own colors, their own cities, their own music, their own storylines,” she says. “They were so far away from my own family. In a way, I wish I had a better answer. I really don’t know where they came from in my unconscious, but I knew them. I really felt like I knew these sisters.”
Mellors is herself a sister, and she describes the relationship with her closest sister Daisy as one of the most defining of her life.
“In many ways she is, other than my husband and my baby, the person I love most on Earth. I would die for her, but I also have wanted to kill her with my own hands at times,” she says. “That paradox at the heart of my love for her, the stickiness of that, the ugliness of that, the beauty of that, that those two things could coexist within one relationship is fascinating to me.”
“Siblings are such rich terrain. I feel like I could write 10 books just about different versions of siblings,” she adds. “Everything is there in those relationships.”
Mellors has never been conscious of a time when being a writer wasn’t her dream.
“We had a computer before the internet that was just a word processor, and I would use it to write poems, and always the poems ended with either it was all a dream or everyone died,” she says.
After she graduated from NYU, she knew she wanted to be a professional writer but had no idea how to go about that.
“People that I had admired, people like Zadie Smith, they seemed like they had just always been writers. They sold books so young, and that wasn’t my experience,” Mellors says. “I started a book when I was 25, and I sold it when I was 30.”
In the meantime she went into fashion copywriting, working for brands like J.Crew and Loeffler Randall, while slowly working on “Cleopatra and Frankenstein.”
When the book finally was published, the journey to see it through had made it so her expectations for its reception were modest.
“I didn’t write a book to not be read. I hoped that it would be read, but my goals for the book were very humble. I just wanted it to be in a bookstore and be read by someone not immediately related to me,” she says. “And so those expectations have been enormously exceeded.”
She’s already at work on book number three, and is curiously awaiting what will come with the freedom her success now allows her.
“I wrote ‘Cleopatra and Frankenstein’ and ‘Blue Sisters’ while working as a fashion copywriter, so this third novel is the first book I’ve ever been able to write while not having a full-time job,” she says.
In the meantime, she’s getting to engage in her favorite part, touring the book and talking to her readers — a thing she admits she’s in the minority of writers for enjoying.
“I love it, and not every writer does, understandably, because most people don’t get into writing to be around a ton of people,” she says. “But I am quite social as a writer, and I get a lot of energy from being around people and talking to other people. Obviously, it can be tiring as well, but I find the experience of touring and doing signings truly one of the greatest joys of my life.”
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