Coco Mellors knows about slow burn. While living in New York and working as a copywriter, the author spent years crafting her debut novel and sending the manuscript to publishers, only to have them all reject it. She had the book rewritten and eventually sold Cleopatra and Frankensteinabout the gradual implosion of an impulsive marriage, at Bloomsbury (US) and HarperCollins (UK). “There’s so much pressure on pub week in this industry, but it took a year for the book to become a bestseller in the UK and two years in the US,” says Mellors. “But for me, it’s a book that has a really long tail in a really lovely way.”
Cleopatra has become an It-book for It-girls, with its aesthetic cover seen everywhere from Instagram to an episode of And that's exactly right. While her debut novel was enjoying huge success, Mellors set to work on her follow-up, a story about estranged sisters struggling to contain the worst sides of themselves in the aftermath of a family tragedy. When Blue Sisters published overseas this summer, became an instant bestseller, and is on track to do the same here in the States (it hit shelves on September 3). It’s a full-circle moment for the author, who says that while success makes her feel good, she’s focused on the long term. “A book is really for a lifetime, and I’d love to write books that people will read long after I’m dead,” she says. “I like the idea of having readers who haven’t even been born yet.”
Here, Mellors talks about DAY From her home in Brooklyn, she talks about how she gained notoriety as a sober writer, navigating the Hollywood landscape as Cleopatra it unfolds through the process of adaptation, and that great And that's exactly it. moment.
From Blue Sisters It’s been out in the UK for a few months now and you’ve been doing some big events during your promotional tour. What have you learned about your readers from all this face-to-face interaction?
It's a lot of women in their twenties and thirties, it's funny, so I have a son and I understand that for those of that group who have children, it's hard to go to a reading at 7:00 on a Thursday. I write about things that are hard to talk about. Addiction, what it's like to be related to people who are addicts and in Blue Sisterschronic pain and endometriosis. The reader experiences these things for the first time in the intimacy of the book, and then sees me talk about it and realizes that I’m not ashamed or afraid. This allows them to share when they come talk to me in the signing line. People share vulnerable things with me, or sometimes just say thank you for giving me a space to feel these things. I cry pretty much every time I have an event, because I’m so moved by being able to connect with other people in that way.
Now that you’re better known than you were when you first started, are you more afraid to publish another vulnerable book?
I think with Blue Sisters I actually feel more protected by how clearly fictionalized the story is. With Cleopatrathere were obvious parallels between me and Cleo, and I played with them. I lived to regret it, in a way, because I'm not her at all. In the new book, there's no parallel to me, no one reads those sisters and thinks oh Coco is Lucky or Coco is Bonnie. It's nice to know that it's going to be talked about as fiction.
Can you tell us about your decision to become more of a public person?
I made a choice early on in my career that I was going to be open about being sober. I am very open about being sober in my life. My local grocery store clerk probably knows that I am sober. I come from a family where the vast majority of us are now sober, so I couldn’t really imagine having a career where I wrote about addiction, and not necessarily by choice, and then not owning up to the fact that it’s something I’ve experienced. I’m proud to be a sober person and I really wish I had more sober writers to look up to when I was younger.
When we were young, I think the idea of a writer or a creative person drinking a lot was an attraction for us…
Yes, it was almost seen as what helped them write. I recently went back and reread Hemingway. A Moveable Feastand he was really a guy who could drink and write in some way. Obviously it didn’t work out for him in the end. But he wrote about F. Scott Fitzgerald and how desperate he was to write, and how his relationships and drinking kept getting in the way. And I remember feeling that way when I was young, like I had potential and there was something there, but I couldn’t do it with the lifestyle I was living. I was hungover several days a week. Obviously Fitzgerald managed to do an incredible job through his struggles, but I think about what he would have done if he had been able to be sober?
Your character names have been very much a part of the work and their branding so far, if I may put it that way. How intentional are you?
Martin Amos was my teacher and he talked a lot about the power of names. With the Blue sisters, I liked that they all sounded like -E at the end, that there was a sense of sisterhood even in the way their names sounded. It’s a fun process: I have a son now and I was initially worried about using names that I would want for a baby in my book. I have a couple of names in my new book that I would have loved, but now that they’re associated with the book I could never use them for a newborn.
When did you start the process of selling film and television rights to Cleopatra and FrankensteinDid you know you wanted to be involved in the adaptation? Or did it happen afterwards?
I knew I wanted to be involved. It was my first book, but it was also very dialogue-heavy and I felt like I could preserve the voices in the book. I love the idea of having a writer's room and I'm excited about the collaborative element, but I wasn't ready to say, okay, take that away. It's my first baby. I really admire what Taffy [Brodesser-Akner] made with Fleishman is in troubleI thought it was just a great consistency of voice between the book and the series.
It's funny, because the book had a much easier time going through the process of pitching it to film and TV than it did trying to get published as a book. I remember thinking, wow, people in Hollywood seem to really like this. They were more open to it than traditional publishing, maybe because it's a pretty glamorous world and it's very character-driven.
Warner Bros. TV owns the rights, but what is the current status of the project?
I'm adapting it and hoping we sell it. I have a great co-author and it's been a really fun process. I would never want to write a sequel to the book, but I love the idea of characters evolving on screen and storylines evolving through multiple seasons. I think the end of the book is also a beginning: it's two people coming to a conclusion that may or may not last. You never know.
The book has already made it to the screen, in a sense, as it was featured in an episode of And that's exactly it.…
I've always said it Sex and the City that's how I learned to write dialogue. I kind of watch that show all the time. When I can't sleep I close my eyes and I can watch the episodes in my head because I've seen it so many times. So to have my book on this new version of the show, and to have it in Carrie's hands, was beyond my wildest dreams. I had been told that their prop stylist had asked for a copy of the book, and just to have a book that was part of the cultural consciousness enough for that was incredible. But then when I saw the episode and she had the book in bed, I thought, who needs a Pulitzer when you have this?