‘Certain themes really choose writers,” says author Coco Mellors from her home in New York, where she lives with her husband and son. “Addiction is a theme I never really chose to write about, but I cannot escape it.”
Mellors’ bestselling debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, is about a whirlwind romance between struggling artist Cleo and functioning alcoholic Frank. Published in 2022, the book has sold nearly 200,000 copies in the UK, catapulting Mellors from obscurity to literary stardom. It became an “It book” on social media, largely thanks to its artfully designed cover (a crudely rendered oil painting of a sad, beautiful woman by Gill Button, designed by Jo Thomson), and was chosen as Carrie Bradshaw’s bedtime read in an episode of And Just Like That. TV rights were sold to Warner Bros in late 2022, with Mellors signed on to adapt it herself.
