[ad_1]
Coco Mellors went boxing on a beach in Los Angeles — for research, of course.
With gold boxing gloves, headgear and a mouthpiece in tow, the author behind this month’s Read With Jenna pick, “Blue Sisters,” hit the beach three times per week with a professional boxing coach after she decided she wanted one of her characters inin the book to be a boxer.
“I trained on the beach every day, outdoors, with this professional boxing trainer, and it was so fun,” she tells TODAY.com through laughter. “I really had the time of my life. You can’t help but have respect for those incredible athletes. Actually doing it, even just doing a three minute round of trying to spar and breathe at the same time… I’m just completely in awe.”
“It was an unexpected part of a writer’s life,” she adds. “It can be pretty stationary being a writer, so it’s nice to have to build in something physical to the process.”
Since the release of “Blue Sisters” on Sept. 3, the novel has become an instant Top 10 bestseller on The New York Times’ hardcover fiction list and ubiquitous on Instagram and TikTok.
Mellors’ second novel follows the four Blue sisters — Avery, Bonnie, Nicky and Lucky. All grew up in Manhattan, but by adulthood, Avery has left for London, Bonnie has gone to LA and Lucky lives in Paris.
Mellors summarizes the book like this: “In my mind, ‘Blue Sisters’ is a modern day ‘Little Women’ meets ‘The Royal Tenenbaums.’”
When Nicky unexpectedly dies in New York, her three sisters return and help their parents sell the Upper West Side apartment that was their childhood home. Avery, Bonnie and Lucky face much more than the end of childhood, as they battle grief, addiction and more.
“I was really interested in the iconography of four sisters, and then what happens when they become three,” Mellors said on TODAY on Sept. 25. “It’s an immediately destabilizing place to start a story from, and I was wondering how they could find harmony and symmetry in this odd number three, when we’re so used to seeing that with four.”
How Mellors, a Brit, wrote 2 American novels
Mellors, 35, was born in London, and moved to New York when she was 15 when her father relocated to the U.S. for a new job.
“I basically stayed in New York ever since. I just got, like, New York-pilled,” she says with a laugh. “I just didn’t want to leave. And I always wanted to be a writer.”
At 4, she played a game called “Write my book,” where she’d take fax paper, scribble all over it and tell her mom she was writing a novel.
In college she studied English literature, and after graduating, worked in fashion copywriting for several years.
“I knew I wanted to write,” she says. “I didn’t really know how to make a living as a writer, and I hadn’t worked on a novel yet.”
At 25, she applied to New York University’s MFA program in fiction, and worked as a freelance fashion copywriter as she worked on what would become “Cleopatra and Frankenstein” on nights and weekends.
She sold the book at 30, and the novel was released in 2022 to critical acclaim and commercial success. The book’s painted cover became a mainstay on social media and beyond. It was even featured in the hands of Carrie Bradshaw in an episode of the “Sex in the City” spinoff “And Just Like That…”.
“It’s about coming of age, whatever age you are, whether you’re 24 or 45,” she says. “And it’s also a New York novel. It’s a very particular slice of New York. It’s what I call like the F. Scott Fitzgerald effect — champagne bubbles and parties and beautiful people and beautiful clothes. But the story is about the grit beneath the glamor and the loneliness just beneath the surface of these dazzling moments.”
Mellors says that if her debut novel was an ode to New York City, then “Blue Sisters” is a love letter to each city she’s lived in.
“London, New York, Los Angeles and Paris are the four cities that have defined me as a person, and made me who I am,” she says.
But it’s an “American novel” above all, she says. “As much as I am British, I’ve lived in America for 20 years now, and it’s the country that I chose, as opposed to the country that I was born into,” she says.
Pregnancy on the page and off
🚨 Warning: This section contains spoilers for “Blue Sisters.”
Mellors says her personal questions and obsessions made it into “Blue Sisters,” especially when it came to considering motherhood. For the first two years she was writing “Blue Sisters,” she wasn’t actively trying to have a baby.
“But I think my unconscious was definitely grappling with it, because it kept coming up as one of the themes that I was going to be writing about,” she says. “So much of what I was grappling with was the choice to become a mother.”
The sense of longing, either to have a child or to not have one, and the questions that surround both choices, imbued the novel, Mellors says.
Avery, one of the sisters, is ambivalent about motherhood, but her partner wants to have a child. Nicky, the sister who dies, wanted a child, but had endometriosis, which can impact fertility.
“For me, any woman who starts trying to conceive and doesn’t have it be a totally immediate or smooth journey knows it’s the ultimate unknown. You really don’t know ‘til you try if you’re going to be able to do this thing — if it will be easy, if it will happen in a few months, in a few years,” she says.
“Most women I know who live in New York or LA or London, we are career-driven planners who, if we want to go on vacation, we’ll plan the best vacation for ourselves. If we want to change our careers, we’ll find a way to do it,” she continues. “And suddenly the powerlessness (of) fertility is something that I found quite shocking. So I definitely wanted to have that be an element of the novel.”
In September 2022, Mellors experienced a miscarriage. A week later, she sold “Blue Sisters.”
“I had this professional, emotional and personal whiplash between two really different experiences,” she explains. “One that was really sad, one that was really, really happy.”
The loss not only changed Mellors’ life, but also “profoundly” changed the book during the editing process — including what the author described as an “11th hour” change to the book’s ending.
“I had gotten pregnant again, and I didn’t know if I would stay pregnant and be healthy,” she says. “But I decided in that moment that I really needed from the novel and from the story, a feeling of hope, and I wanted to give these sisters something that felt beautiful.”
Mellors welcomed her first child, a baby boy named Indigo, seven weeks early in November 2023. And it was while she was recovering from an emergency C-section that she learned she would be a Read With Jenna author.
“I gave birth on Saturday, and I found out about Read With Jenna on Monday. I was still in the hospital,” she says.
“My agent was like, so sorry to bother, I know you’re in the middle of things… I was like, literally still on an IV. She was like, ‘I have some great news, which is that you have been chosen!’ And I was like, ‘Yay!’ and my husband was like, ‘Don’t move! Your blood pressure!’” she recalls through laughter. “I was delighted, but it also it came a little bit in the wake of some even bigger news in my life, which is that my son was born. That is how I found out, and I just couldn’t have been more excited.”
A sober writer on writing about addiction
Raised by a father with an alcohol dependency, almost all of the Blue sisters have histories of addiction, too. Avery is sober and Lucky goes to AA.
The sisters don’t think of Nicky as an addict, but she had secretly been turning to opioids for pain management due to her endometriosis. She accidentally overdoses after taking pain medication laced with fentanyl.
Endometriosis is an often-painful condition in which tissue that is similar to the inner lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, according to Mayo Clinic.
While the condition affects about 10% of women, or about 190 million women on Earth, according to the World Health Organization, there is no known cure and access to treatment is often limited.
“I thought a lot about what would have been the preceding events to Nicky’s death. I had a sense that it would be an overdose, because I wanted to talk, in a glancing way, about opioids in America and the tragic deaths that come from them,” Mellors says, adding that there are other books that cover the topic in “tremendous, amazing depth.”
“It was important to me because I’m in recovery, and it’s something that I’ve witnessed many people experience, and the quickness of those deaths — the shocking nature of them,” she adds. “I had to think backwards, like, ‘Why would a character who ordinarily wouldn’t have ever taken pain medication, potentially be doing that?’”
Mellors says she honed in on endometriosis, as it affects so many women.
“I’m really always drawn to writing about what we have a hard time talking about,” she continues. “Endometriosis is one of those diseases that I think is deeply affecting women living with it. It’s not visible, and it’s often not diagnosed.”
Mellors adds she wanted to give endometriosis the “gravitas” that it often doesn’t get, because it’s so often dismissed, though she’s clear she was not trying to “politicize” it.
“I write stories that I feel are emotionally real, so my goal is never to evangelize,” she says. “But I did think it was a really important topic, and I felt like if I could shed light on it through the world of this very specific woman and this very specific family, it was something that I wanted to do.”
“Blue Sisters” was published in the U.K. in May, and Mellors says that while she was prepared for questions from readers about addiction, she was “incredibly moved” by how many women shared their experiences with endometriosis with her on her book tour.
“I hope it opens up a more destigmatized dialogue around addiction, and also around endometriosis and chronic pain,” she says. “I hope that it allows people they feel like they want to talk about those things with people in their own life. I hope it helps them feel like this has given them maybe, a little doorway into that.”
The book was released earlier this year in the U.K., and published in the U.S. on Sept. 3.
“For me, it coming out (in the U.S.) is, in my heart, it’s the most exciting launch that can happen,” she says with a grin.
