Blue Sisters, Coco Mellors

In Blue Sisters, Coco Mellors returns to the themes of addiction and self-destruction that shaped her debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, but this time places them within the dynamics of a single family. The four Blue sisters – Avery, Bonnie, Lucky, and Nicky – are different in temperament, choices, and way of life, yet connected strongly enough to resemble an almost closed system.

Until one of them dies. A year after Nicky’s death, the remaining three sisters must return to the New York apartment where they grew up and confront not only their loss, but also their own versions of what it actually means to belong to a family.

Avery, the eldest, is now a successful lawyer in London, but years earlier struggled with drug addiction. Bonnie is a professional boxer who, after a devastating loss, has walked away from the sport and now works as a security guard in Los Angeles. Lucky, the youngest, is a model living amid the glamour of Paris, parties, alcohol, and drugs. Nicky suffered from chronic pain caused by endometriosis and died after taking pills containing fentanyl.

But Blue Sisters is not simply a novel about grief. It is also a book about the roles families assign to their children – the sensible one, the strong one, the beautiful one, the vulnerable one and how difficult it can be to stop performing that role even after you have grown up.

Four Sisters Who Were Never Meant to Be Alike

Mellors deliberately constructs the sisters as almost opposing worlds. They have different careers, different cities, different energies, and different ways of dealing with pain. As she explains: “I wanted to write a book about exceptionally different siblings with distinct tastes within one family. I wanted them to have their own city, colors, music taste, and style while still being a unit and having something that feels harmonious.”

Avery is control, Bonnie is physical strength, Lucky is beauty and chaos and Nicky is the sister around whom the others seem to have arranged themselves. When one part of that system disappears, the others are no longer entirely sure who they are without her.

That is also why returning to the family home is more than simply a narrative device to bring them back together. The New York apartment takes them back to the period when those roles were formed – to their parents, addictions, conflicts, and to the versions of themselves they have spent years trying to leave behind.

“The Person I Would Die for but Also Want to Kill”

The bond between sisters is a deeply personal subject for Coco Mellors. She grew up with siblings herself and speaks particularly candidly about her relationship with her older sister, Daisy Bell: “I can sum it up by saying she’s probably the only person I know who I would die for but also want to kill.”

It sounds like a joke, but that contradiction is actually at the heart of Blue Sisters. Sisterly love in Mellors’ novel is not idealized. It can be tender and cruel, unconditional and destructive, filled with solidarity but also with words we would never allow anyone else to say to us.

Mellors puts it even more directly: “Even though the Blue family is not my own, if I’m going to write about family, I want to write about the type that I understand, which is deeply loving and deeply fucked-up. That’s just the truth for me.”

When a Reader Recognizes a Real Person

But Blue Sisters also became the center of a very different literary question. In November 2024, London poet James Massiah publicly accused Mellors of giving the character Charlie too many recognizable elements from his own life.

Charlie is a Black poet from London who lives with his parents and speaks openly about drugs and sexuality. The character organizes poetry nights in East London and uses ideas and expressions that Massiah has also used publicly.

The situation becomes more complicated because the two were not strangers. According to Massiah, he and Mellors had known each other and been in contact since 2018. He says that when he initially asked whether Charlie was based on him, Mellors denied it. After he raised the issue again and pointed to specific similarities, Massiah says Mellors acknowledged that she should have warned him about the character in advance.