In “Blue Sisters”, Author Coco Mellors Captures Both the ‘Light’ and ‘Horrendous’ Sides of Sisterhood (Exclusive)

"I love a family drama," says Mellors, whose new novel is the Read with Jenna book club Sept. 2024 selection

It took author Coco Mellors five years to write her debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, but the journey helped with future projects.

She wrote at night and on weekends while working as a fashion copywriter and earning her MFA in fiction from New York University, and though the book eventually became a bestseller, as well as the subject of many passionate reader reviews on TikTok, her success wasn’t immediate. That experience did, however, prepare Mellors for the journey of publishing her second novel, Blue Sisters, out now from Ballantine Books.

“No writing process is ever completely smooth. A novel is a long labor of love,” the author told PEOPLE at the Creator Book Club event, hosted by Threads, in New York City on Sept. 25. “I definitely found I had more confidence this time around, because I knew I had finished a novel before, and I had faith that I could do it again.”

And she has. Blue Sisters was an instant New York Times bestseller upon its Sept. 3 release, and Jenna Bush Hager recently chose it as the Sept. 2024 selection for her Read with Jenna book club. Bush Hager also moderated a discussion with Mellors at the Creator Book Club event.

Following a trio of sisters who are mourning the unexpected loss of their fourth, the novel chronicles the ups and downs the Blue siblings face as they return to the New York City apartment where they were raised. Mellors, who cites James Baldwin, Zadie Smith and Jennifer Egan as authors she consistently returns to, was drawn to family sagas while writing Blue Sisters, including Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel Little Women and Wes Anderson’s 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums.

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“I love a family drama and I love an eccentric family story,” Mellors says. “I was inspired by this idea of extremely different siblings coexisting in one family: Exceptional people that are also exceptionally different, and how that can happen in families, and what it looks like to try to create a harmonious whole when each of the parts are so phenomenally different.”

Mellors, who wrote the book while living in Los Angeles during the pandemic, grew up between London and New York, and says that drafting the novel became her only way to “travel” during that period.

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“Even though it was such a difficult time, it was also a really peaceful time for me,” she says. “I feel like I was able to go a lot deeper with these characters as a result.” For research, Mellors also interviewed models whose lives were shaped by the fashion industry, to better understand Lucky’s character, and even trained with a boxing coach for a year to write Bonnie's — during which the author ended up with a black eye.

“My boxing coach was really tough," she says. "He definitely did not go easy on me.”

The Blue sisters are continually impacted by hardships from their childhood and beyond throughout the novel: grief, of course, but also parental neglect, chronic disease and addiction. Mellors has spoken openly about her own sobriety journey, and says that putting difficult topics on the page is part of what drives her as a writer.

“I like to write about things that are hard to talk about, but I also write about the things that I am talking about,” she says. “So, in some ways, those topics are unavoidable for me because they're what interests me in life.”

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“Of course, it's challenging to sit with those topics day after day, but I'm always writing at the same time about love and hope,” she adds. The complexity of sisterhood was also a challenge to capture, especially trying to “temper the dark with the light.”

“I was also wary of not having the reader turn against [the characters] at any point because the way that we talk to our sisters truly can be horrendous,” she says. The youngest of four siblings, Mellors understands this all too well.

“I remember my sister and I having a fight at the beginning of dinner and me saying, ‘I'm literally never going to speak to you again. You're out of my life,’” she recalls. “And then by the end of dinner, we were sharing dessert. That's the timeframe of a sibling fight. Sometimes they're like summer storms: very intense, and then they pass.”

That's also a relatable topic for Bush Hager, who tells PEOPLE that, as a sister herself, she was drawn to the “real way” the messiness of siblinghood is portrayed in the novel. Joining the roster of Read with Jenna authors was meaningful in another way for Mellors too.

“I ended up actually finding out that I was the Read with Jenna pick two days after I gave birth to my son,” the author says. “So, it was already a very happy time in my life, but it felt unexpected, and also so right … It feels like she's like my fairy book mother.”

Related: Jenna Bush Hager's Book Club: See All of the Today Show Host's 2024 Read with Jenna Picks

Finding community with Blue Sisters, through avenues like Read with Jenna and BookThreads, a reader community on the social app, is also important to Mellors.

“I think the sides and parts of ourselves that are the most hidden, or sometimes the most shameful, are also what connect us the most deeply to others,” she says. “So to feel that I have in, any way through the book, reached out a hand to someone and drawn them in and made them feel part of this sisterhood and of this compassionate circle of regard is amazing.”

The author is already at work on her third novel, which will follow a filmmaker in Paris during the city’s hottest summer on record. As Mellors explains it, her protagonist’s biological clock is ticking alongside the impending climate crisis.

“It's interesting to talk about topics of fertility and the desire for family versus the desire for total freedom, which I think women can feel, in some ways, are counter to each other,” Mellors says. As a new mother herself, now living in Brooklyn, she's also enjoying writing about someone who “is just a little bit earlier on” in that journey.

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With Blue Sisters, however, despite its already-whirlwind experience, Mellors says the most rewarding part of the whole process was getting the seal of approval from her own sister, Daisy.

“None of the characters are remotely like her, and I didn't base any of the characters on my own family, but she's just said, ‘You captured how I feel about you. You captured the love we have,’ Mellors recalls. “She read a very, very early draft of the novel and it changed a lot since. But I just remember feeling like, ‘Okay, good. Mission accomplished.’”

Blue Sisters is now available, wherever books are sold.

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