Why author Coco Mellors got a black eye to write ‘Blue Sisters’

NEW YORK – Forget Zodiac signs, Coco Mellors wants to know your birth order. 
The “Cleopatra and Frankenstein” author is celebrating her sophomore novel “Blue Sisters” (out now), which chronicles three sisters, “Blue” in both surname and disposition, a year after their fourth sister’s unexpected death. Across London, Paris, Los Angeles and New York City, the sisters come together and pull apart, grappling with what happens when four becomes three. 
Settling into a couch at a Spotify event celebrating audiobook listening, Mellors tells me about layering three very distinct narratives: lawyer Avery, who is 10 years sober at the start of the novel; professional-boxer-turned-bouncer Bonnie and globe-trotting model Lucky. Nicky, whose death leaves the sisters reeling in different ways, was the golden child of the family.
Classic sibling dynamics – the eldest daughter with the world balancing on her shoulders, the peacekeeping middle sister, the wild child baby of the family – are just part of the backdrop for their stories. “Blue Sisters” sees sisterhood tested through grief, addiction and complicated parent dynamics.
“Our siblings really define who we are in a way that is not always seen as important as our parents, but I think is incredibly crucial to our family and our identity,” Mellors says. “I wanted to write about sisterhood in a way that captured the messiness and stickiness of that love. I didn’t want to sanitize it, I didn’t want to make it the same as friendship.”
Check out: USA TODAY’s weekly Best-selling Booklist
Just feet from where we chat, an entire team is setting up for “A Cozy Evening with Coco Mellors” complete with rustic autumn decor and a guest list of Booktok’s biggest stars. There’s even a tea-tasting station by Té Company, four unique blends inspired by the sisters and their cities.
It’s the kind of attention to detail Mellors drilled into her own writing process, immersing her senses differently for each sister. She listened to melancholic music while writing Avery, rap music for Bonnie, girl power anthems for Nicky and punk rock for Lucky. She gave them distinct color palettes – dark blues for Avery, red and gold for Bonnie and bubblegum pink for Nicky. Lucky was the color black with some contrasting light greens. 
But writing “Blue Sisters” wasn’t all a mental game. To get into the mindset of Bonnie, she trained like a boxer three times a week for more than a year – even getting a black eye in the process.
It was an exercise in writing “what you’re curious about,” she told readers at the Spotify event. Mellors is a huge boxing fan. 
“It’s incredibly physically arduous and it’s extremely technical mentally. It’s like chess on the body,” she said, answering an audience question. It helped her round out a character who willingly gets in the ring but is also the most gentle of the four sisters.
Differences create four unique character perspectives in the book. But it’s the similarities that create a family. After each character experiences grief in their respective cities, circumstance brings all three back to their childhood apartment in New York City. Here, the characters begin to overlap – they borrow from each other’s closets and vocabularies. Their colors blend and bleed into their own.
“I almost imagined it like creating a braid where I had these three distinct narratives and then I was layering them, one on top of the other, in this rhythm,” Mellors says. 
Most poignant is the way addiction snakes through family history. Substance use disorders can be inherited, influenced by both genes and environmental factors, the National Institute of Health says. In “Blue Sisters,” their father’s alcohol dependency outlines their childhood.
And it shows up differently in each of the daughters. Avery struggles with heroin addiction for years before getting sober. Lucky is at a crossroads. Nicky turned to illicit painkillers to deal with the torment of her endometriosis and overdosed after taking pills laced with fentanyl. 
This subject is personal for Mellors, who is sober. 
“I wanted to show how many different faces there are of addiction. I wanted to show how it moves through generations and affects different generations in one family,” she says. “I also really had not seen, in any kind of pop culture or literature, what recovery looks like – not only to get sober but to stay sober for many years.”
When asked if birth order will play a big role in her future work, she says yes, but not until the fourth novel. With her next book – about maternity, womanhood and the biological clock – she’s playing around with writing an only child.
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental and/or substance use disorders, you can call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s free and confidential treatment referral and information service at 1-800-662-HELP (4357). It’s available 24/7 in English and Spanish (TTY: 1-800-487-4889).
Taste is subjective, and USA TODAY Books has plenty of genres to recommend. Want a buzzy new literary fiction title? Read our review of “Intermezzo” by Sally Rooney. Are mysteries your thing? Try these titles similar to “Verity” by Colleen Hoover or see if you’re brave enough for one of our favorite horror novels. Or if you want something with lower stakes and loveable characters, see if a “cozy mystery” or “cozy fantasy” book is for you.