There is a scene in Cleopatra And Frankenstein, the debut novel from writer Coco Mellors, that is plucked straight from a story she first heard in childhood. It was her parents’ honeymoon and her father decided it would be a good idea to balance on the balcony of the hotel and bet with fellow guests whether or not he’d die from jumping into the pool below. “My mum was incensed with him,” Mellors, who is calling from Los Angeles where she currently resides, tells Stylist. “She was like, you’re such a ​show-off! I hope you jump! And I hope you die!” 

It would therefore be easy to assume that the book, which chronicles 24-year-old artist Cleo’s rocky marriage to a much-older advertising exec Frank, is her parents’ story, but you’d be wrong. “They aren’t Cleo and Frank,” she explains. “But I knew I had to include that story. I love disturbing the reader’s expectations. We anticipate that a honeymoon scene, for example, will be romantic and harmonious, but then it’s full of strife and frustration, which is what makes it unsettling.”

If that hasn’t enticed you, the book’s artful cover, which you’ll likely have seen on your Instagram feed or lighting up Leicester Square on an enormous billboard or accompanying an excerpt in New York magazine, certainly will. Writer Nathan Englander has described it as “a love letter to love”, while journalist Pandora Sykes has called Mellors an “elegant and exciting new voice”. She’s already in discussions for it to become a television series. In short: it’s everywhere. 

For Mellors, who wrote it over a five-year period while freelancing as a copywriter, it feels like a dream she was never quite sure she’d be able to realise. “I was in this very anonymous space without an agent when I wrote it, so I didn’t even know if the book would get published. Sometimes I’d have this worry of: what am I doing? Am I delusional? Is this just a pipe dream?.”

It was during these anonymous years that Mellors crafted her flawed characters, their issues, their coping mechanisms and their candid humour, jotting down anything funny she observed on scraps on paper. “I was like a magpie collecting shiny jewels for a nest. At the time, I wondered, ‘Where am I going to use these?’ But then they found their way into the book through a character. It’s been delightful to talk to people who also find the things she notices funny too.”

Despite the praise that’s been heaped on the book, Mellors has occasionally found herself on Goodreads (the enemy of novelists) stumbling upon criticism. “I saw one review that said they couldn’t make it past the first because it was so cheesy. I wish they had because that frothy first chapter works to set up an expectation (of a romcom) that then flips,” she explains. “Really, it’s about the darkness beneath that glittering facade.” 

Happy publication month, Coco. What’s the response been like so far?

One of the things that has been exciting is to see people have such compassion towards these characters, especially as I’ve written a group of people who are very flawed and at times extremely frustrating. So to find readers who are so willing to relate and also withhold judgment in order to get to know them has been really gratifying. It feels very affirming of the human spirit and the human desire to connect.

A lot of the characters in this book struggle with loneliness, which you’ve said you related to. Can you tell me more about that?

The thing about loneliness is that it’s invisible a lot of the time – I was someone who didn’t necessarily seem like I was lonely (I often deliberately surrounded myself with people) and I wasn’t sharing the truth of my lived experience for many years. I was struggling with alcoholism in my early 20s, which separates you from the people you love and also from yourself, which is very painful. I stopped being able to recognise who I was and it became important to me to write about that.

My north star for writing has always been a quote from David Foster Wallace. He was asked why he writes and he said: “Because the good stuff makes you feel less lonely.” It’s such a simple statement but it made me realise that’s why I read and write. For me, the way to make people feel less lonely was to write openly about the parts of ourselves that we keep hidden, and that we’re ashamed of.

Did you know that you would incorporate addiction from the beginning?

No! It makes me laugh that when I started this book I didn’t think it was a book about addiction at all. I changed so much over the course of writing it – going from denial to acceptance – and so did my characters. But I think these characters are slightly delusional to a degree, which is harsh to say, but they’re in a kind of fantasy.

You explore the psychology of your characters really well. Your mother is a therapist, did you grow up around a lot of therapy chat?

Everyone in my family is very therapised. I forget sometimes there’s still a lot of stigma around therapy and sobriety in England, and that people can be embarrassed to admit they might need help. I’m grateful I didn’t grow up that way because of my mother – I started going to see a therapist when I was a teenager, which meant I had an emotional vocabulary from a young age, and a willingness to talk about feelings and inner worlds. When it came to the book, I wrote about what interests me and that’s human nature, and why we do the things we do. 

Did you get any advice on writing that you’ve clung to?

My writing professor Amy Hempel was a huge role model to me. Not just in her writing, but also in the way she lived her life. When I was growing up, the icons of the writing world were people like Hemingway and Hunter S Thompson – white men who very much glamorised addiction in their lives. They were seen as lone-wolf geniuses who created masterpieces alone without any help. Amy, by contrast, is incredibly collaborative – she co-wrote a novel with one of her friends a couple of years ago – and also generous of spirit, not egoistic in the slightest. I remember just looking at her and thinking: that’s how I want to be as a writer. She’s probably the reason that I wrote this book, because she made me feel confident. 

You’ve spoken about how the book was turned down by 30 publishers in the beginning. What did that teach you about rejection?

I’m really open about that because I would rather be useful than admired. I think it’s extremely useful for aspiring creatives to hear about someone for whom it didn’t happen easily. You learn quickly that the writer’s life is one of rejection, even for people who seem to have these shiny stories of being published quickly.

My agent sent the book out to 15 UK and 15 US publishers, but the form it was in was different. So then I got this big word document back of all these rejections one after another, it was like being tickled to death because they were all being so kind and generous about it. Lots of them said the same thing, which was that the structure wasn’t working. I’m a firm believer that if you heard the same thing more than three times you have to trust that it’s true.

Two editors offered to read it again after I’d revised it – now knowing how busy editors are, it’s incredible to me that they did that. I went away and did a big rewrite over Christmas, sent it back to those two editors, and they ended up buying it. I had to have compassion for myself during that process because I was learning. This is something I tell aspiring novelists when they reach out to me now: be so kind to yourself. It’s ok if you don’t know how to do it yet.

Finally, what are you reading right now?

I adored Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. She’s a remarkable writer and the book is an incredibly generous portrait of trans women and their relationships and women in general. I also recently read Olga Dies Dreaming by Xóchitl González. It’s part political saga, part romance and is incredibly intelligent. I loved it.

Images courtesy of publisher and Coco Mellors. Cleopatra and Frankenstein is published by 4th Estate, £14.99.