Saturn Returns with Caggie - Coco Mellors, Author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein, on Sobriety, Motherhood, and Creative Expression

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

In this deeply insightful episode, Caggie sits down with New York-based writer and bestselling author Coco Mellors, known for her critically acclaimed novels Cleopatra and Frankenstein and Blue Sisters. Coco, now a mother to her son Indigo Sky, shares intimate reflections on her journey as a writer, mother, and sober individual. Key Highlights: Challenging Birth Experience: Coco opens up about the difficult birth of her son, Indigo Sky, revealing how the experience has shaped her views on motherhood and self-discovery. The Creative Journey Behind Cleopatra and Frankenstein: Coco provides a fascinating look into the five-year process of writing her debut novel, which dives deep into the complexities of love, marriage, and identity. She emphasizes the power of honesty and imagination in her work, offering valuable insight into the challenges and rewards of crafting such an intimate story. Sobriety and Its Impact: At 26, Coco made the life-changing decision to become sober. She reflects on how this choice has influenced her writing, as well as her personal life, providing a raw and honest account of the role sobriety has played in her creative journey. From Page to Screen – Novel Adaptation: Coco also discusses the exciting process of adapting Cleopatra and Frankenstein into a TV series. She shares the behind-the-scenes details of bringing her novel to a new medium, exploring the challenges of maintaining the story’s integrity while navigating the world of television. Motherhood and Sibling Relationships: As a new mother, Coco delves into the complexities of motherhood and how it intertwines with the dynamics of sibling relationships. She reflects on the importance of balancing family life with her identity as a writer. The Importance of Community and Support: Throughout the conversation, Coco and Caggie explore the significance of having a strong community and support system, both in personal challenges and creative endeavors. Coco’s journey serves as a reminder of the strength we find in others, whether in writing, motherhood, or sobriety. Tune in for an inspiring and heartfelt conversation with Coco Mellors as she shares her experiences with vulnerability, creativity, and transformation. — This Episode was made possible by our friends at East Healing. Visit easthealing.com today to explore our full range of acupressure products and start your journey to enhanced well-being. For a limited time, podcast listeners can enjoy an exclusive discount with the code ‘SATURN15’ at checkout. Our community Substack, “You are not alone”, has now launched! This space is dedicated to deep, honest conversations around the struggles we all face—because no one should feel alone on their journey. Whether you’re navigating personal challenges or seeking inspiration in your creative pursuits, join the community on Substack here. Follow or subscribe to “Saturn Returns” for future episodes, where we explore the transformative impact of Saturn’s return with inspiring guests and thought-provoking discussions. Follow Caggie Dunlop on Instagram to stay update on her personal journey and you can find Saturn Returns on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Order the Saturn Returns Book here.

I have long been a fan of Chinese medicine healing tools, so I am delighted to share our partners for this season of Saturn Returns, the amazing East Healing. Formerly known as AcuSeeds, East Healing is the UK's leading ear seed brand and a luxurious destination for holistic health enthusiasts, blending the ancient art of acupressure with modern elegance. You may have seen them receive investment from Steven Bartlett on Dragonstone back in January. My mum gifted me an AcuSeeds ear seed kit for my birthday this year and I've been a fan ever since. These small beads are placed on the ear to stimulate pressure points, helping aid stress,

anxiety, headaches, sleep, and improve overall wellness. I love their luxury take on this ancient healing tool. Their collection includes 24 karat gold Swarovski crystal, pearl, and nickel-free options. Visit EastHealing.com today to explore the full range of acupressure products and start your journey to enhance wellbeing. For a limited time, you can enjoy an exclusive discount with the code SATIN15 at checkout.

Hello everyone and welcome to Saturn Returns with me, Kage Dunlop. This is a podcast that aims to bring clarity, during transitional times where there can be confusion and doubt. In today's episode I had the pleasure of sitting down with Coco Mellers, a British-born, New York-raised author best known for her critically acclaimed debut novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein which I raced through. walks where I just like go for a walk, I listen to music, I don't, you know, that's all I do. And I just let my mind go, like wherever it wants to go. Slowly over time I get out, I break out of that kind of like the daily rigmarole and my mind is free and that's often where the fiction comes

from for me. Having completed her MFA in fiction at New York University, Mella's writing explores the intricacies of human relationships, addiction and personal growth. Her work often draws from her own life experiences such as her journey with sobriety and the challenges of balancing creativity with the realities of life. Cleopatra and Frankenstein became a Sunday Times bestseller and is currently being adapted into a television series by Warner Brothers making her a rising voice in contemporary fiction. And as many of you know, creativity has been my word for the year and so I loved sitting down with Coco and felt like we really connected. I had no idea which way this conversation was going to go. I didn't know very much about her

sobriety when we started talking so for those that are on that journey or the sober curious journey I think you'll find that very interesting but also the creative path because I found a lot of comfort in her approach to it that there was she didn't put too much pressure on herself and she knew her strengths and her weaknesses when you know writing the books and for those that have read Cleopatra and Frankenstein they all know it's a masterpiece and Blue Sisters as well so I really hope for my creatives out there that are listening to Courage to Create which is out on Friday that you will enjoy this deep dive into the creative process.

Hi, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to talk to you today. From New York, you were just saying that you are, is the baby, how old's the baby? He is three and a half months old, but he was almost two months premature. So he is kind of the size of maybe like a month and a half old. Oh, he's so sweet. I really wanted to have a baby. So I'm delighted that he's just heaven on earth. But I definitely had a difficult birth experience. I had preeclampsia. It's something that can happen when you're pregnant that means that you have to give birth much earlier. And it can be really dangerous both for the mother and the birthing person and the baby. So I had to have an emergency C-section at 32 weeks, which I went basically to the hospital

because I had a stomach ache. I thought I would be sent home with some, I don't know, Pepsid or something. And then within eight hours, I had my baby. And then he was held in intensive care for two months. So it was a very unexpected way of becoming a parent. But as with any of these experiences, the most important thing is that he is fine now, he's healthy and he's thriving. And it just made me so grateful,

so grateful for the things that did go right. We were in a great hospital, we had health insurance, which in America is a big deal and I was taken care of. My mum flew out to look after me, Henry, my husband was incredible. It just, there's so many blessings inside of a very scary experience. I feel like with pregnancy there are always these things that come up or birth that you've just never heard of. You just didn't know were a thing. I know. And I had a totally healthy pregnancy until that point. It was really,

really unexpected. But that I think is just parenthood. You have to be prepared for things to not go as you planned. Oh my God. Well, I'm glad that everything was okay and that he's okay. What's his name? His name's Indigo Sky. That's such a cool name. You're very, I mean, I love your name and we're gonna get into it because I feel like the names in the book that I have been loving, by the way. And before we get into it,

because I have so many questions, but for the audience that doesn't know and isn't familiar with your work, would you be able to explain who you are in your own words and what you do? So I am Coco Mellers. I am a novelist. My first novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein came out in 2020 and it's about a couple, Cleo and Frank, who decide

to get married when they've only known each other for about six months so that Cleo can get a green card to stay in America and also because they're in love. But the marriage doesn't quite go to plan and it ends up affecting both them and this cast of their friends and family, all of the sort of intersection of New York's art, advertising, fashion, and sort of industry worlds. And I always kind of say the book is sort of like the night out and the morning after. It's like the fantasy of life in New York and it's sort of the fall of that fantasy and like the hangover. Yeah because it reminds me, I lived, I had a stint in New York when I was I think 19, 20,

20 and it just, the book just reminded me of the energy of New York and that sort of excitement but then it's all sort of quite hopeless as well. How much is it based off your own experience? I mean it's so funny because when I worked on this book for five years and it's told from seven different perspectives, so it's told from Cleo's perspective, Frank's perspective and then also from members of their family and from friends and so you know it'd be impossible to have all of it based on my experience because I'm writing half the book is written from the perspective of men in their 40s and then you, there's just all sorts of different identities in

the book. But when I was writing Cleo, I mean, there's so many things like her name is close to my name. She has long blonde hair. She's British living in America. And it's so understandable in a way that readers would see such close parallels because that was part of what I was playing with. But actually, she's the character I think that was the hardest to write for me because she is internally so different than me. She's really visual, she's an artist. I'm like highly verbal, Frank, who is a writer and an advertiser.

I actually felt like I had a lot more in common with him and with Eleanor, who's another character that sort of plays the role of the other woman in the story. And so I ended up, I think probably year three of working on the book, Cleo just like, she was still so elusive to me as a character, so mysterious that I ended up giving her my hair and my cowboy boots.

I like put them in the first chapter of the book. The brand of cigarette that I used to smoke, just like these kind of talismanic objects. I like gave them to her to bring her to life. And it worked in that I feel that she's now a fully fleshed character but what I hadn't thought about was that of course every person that reads the book is like oh she's just you right you just like wrote about yourself and everyone thinks that I got married when I was 25 which I most definitely

did not and that I've had any her actual life experience is very different to my own but I definitely gave her a lot of the accoutrements of myself. That's so fascinating. And in terms of, so you said you spent five years working on the book. So like, let's go back to the beginning, that how did you get into writing? Was that something you always wanted to do? And what was that process like over those five years? Was it a constant one? Was it kind of coming in and out of the project? Yes, I mean and for me it's so different for every person. You know some people

can write a book in a year and have it come out a year later and it's much more straightforward than my experience. I started writing the book when I was 25 and I was working as a fashion copywriter. I'd always wanted to be a writer and I studied English literature and creative writing at undergrad, in college. But then when I graduated, I just I didn't know any professional writers. I really didn't know how to be a writer. So I started working as a copywriter, which was a way of making a living and kind of using this skill set. It is completely different to fiction writing. And then in those kind of early years,

when I'm in my early 20s, I stopped writing because I was just sort of living my life and I had a boyfriend and a full-time job, but it ended up being, it was like, I felt like homesick for the work, which is what I really loved, which was being in fictional, imaginative spaces. I was actually writing a different novel

that was set in the 1940s that was sort of based on my father's mother's life and I think it was this thing of wanting to write about a time I hadn't lived in, in an age I wasn't, as a way of like proving myself as a writer I think I thought that that would make me seem more serious or you know have someone you know see me as more intellectual. It took me a while to learn that it's harder to move someone than it is to impress someone. And I think I was trying to be impressive, but actually what makes work really moving

is that it comes from an honest place. It doesn't have to come from an autobiographical place, but it should be honest. So when I started my grad program at NYU, I started working on a scene that had this character, Cleo in it, and then also Frank. And I just, you know, I wanted to, we were working on scenes, one of the things, exercises we were given was to write a scene in which the emotional topography is in direct contradiction to what's physically happening. So it would be like

a funeral in which everything's, you know, the narrator thinks everything is very funny, or a wedding in which someone finds everything very sad. So whatever you would expect the feeling to be, you would try to do the opposite. So I wrote this honeymoon scene and what you would expect is, you know, harmony, eroticism, love, you know, joy, romance. And I wanted to write a scene that was about disharmony

and, you know disappointment and anger and frustration so I wrote this scene that's actually kind of a third of the way into the novel. When they're in France and Clio and Frank are on their honeymoon. Yes that's at the con door. Yeah I was like I feel like I know this hotel. Yeah it's such and it's such a great setting it's such a beautiful place and yet the scene that plays out is between this couple, Cleo and Frank. Frank has gotten drunk and is balancing on the balcony, betting with the other hotel guests if he can dive into the swimming pool below. And Cleo is behind him and, you know, they end up having a big fight as she's smoking a cigarette. She's like, you know, I hope you jump and die, basically. And so then I started to imagine who that couple could be

and why they would be on a honeymoon if they don't really get on. What could force a relationship to move faster than it perhaps should is green card, a marriage for circumstance. And that's kind of what the novel was born out of. Interesting. So it stemmed from an exercise in playing with a situation

and then a contradictory feeling or experience from that situation. You mentioned a second ago about honesty and the importance of it and how it's actually harder to make people feel something. How do we play with honesty when it comes to fiction? How can we still be honest when it's fictional? I think for me it's the difference between these two things which is situation and story. So situation is what's physically happening, it's plot, and story is what's emotionally happening. So you know one of the examples I always give is you could write a story about two people stuck in an elevator, that's the situation, or you could write a story about two people stuck in an elevator. That's the situation. Or you could write a story

about two people forced to confront something that they've been trying to avoid. That's story. That's an emotion. And then you could think, okay, how can I force that to happen in the elevator? But for me, what's honest is the emotional element. So I'm always thinking, okay, like, what emotion am I trying to convey? Like, what am I trying to get these characters to do? The elevator, in quotes? It doesn't, I can make that up. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I've never even set foot inside of an elevator, because I do know what it's like

to have to confront something I've been avoiding. So that's the part that for me always has to be honest. But the plot is like, it's anyone's game. Like, that could be anything I want it to be. And that's what's so incredibly free and fun about fiction, is that, I mean, I get my characters to go places and do things I've never be and that's what's so incredibly free and fun about fiction is that I mean I get my characters to go places and do things I've never done and would never go but what they're experiencing internally is something that on some level I do know really well.

I feel like a lot of people might have or feel that they want to write more, have a book in them but they feel that they haven't got enough experience whether that's in a professional sense or just a lived sense that they actually haven't gone out and done enough things. So it's really about having that you can play off an emotion or something that you've experienced and sort of expand on that particular thing and then use your imagination where you want to take it. I think the imagination is the most underrated thing we have as human beings. The imagination is truly infinite.

There is no limit on what we can imagine and yet somehow it's not something that we actively cultivate in our daily life. It gets worse as we get older and it also because of the landscape that we occupy in terms of social media and everything being digital, I think that we're not using our imaginations, most people, very much at all. No, of course, and also, being on social media, existing in spaces that are algorithmic,

what makes something popular is not what makes it original. What makes something popular is often that it's familiar. So we're staying within these very safe parameters of what's recognizable. But the imagination, the goal of it is to go somewhere unknown, to go somewhere unfamiliar, unusual. So for me, it's so important

to not spend my whole time on social media. I do these things, I go on imagination walks where I just go for a walk, I listen to music, I don't, that's all I do, that's the only reason I have my phone with me. And I just like go for a walk, I listen to music, I don't, you know, that's all I do. That's the only reason I have my phone with me. And I just let my mind go, like wherever it wants to go. And it starts very diurnal. And I often start with just like my litany of like worries

or grievances, and I need to do this, and why didn't that happen? And then slowly over time, I get out, I break out of that kind of like the daily rigmarole and my mind is free and it goes places that I would never usually be. And that's often where the fiction comes from for me. Is that a practice that you've always done or is that a discipline that you've learned by default of what you do as a profession?

I think it's something that as a child I always did and I think all of us do as children, you know, children daydream, you know, and we and children make things up constantly. So and to be honest lying in a child is a sign of high intelligence. I know it could be like concerning I guess if you're the parent of your kid is just making things up constantly but usually it means that it's a great sign, you great sign. And then as for so many things we do as children, they just fall by the wayside. And then in order to do them as an adult, they do become a kind of discipline when in fact, it's the opposite of that. It's meant to be something totally free. How often do we just play as adults? The form of play we often do is sport or exercise,

and yet we make it kind of the opposite of playful. When you see how children inhabit their bodies, how free they are, you know, the way they move, the way they will go and take all the pillows off the sofa and immediately turn it into a fort, like all those things. It's as a writer, you know, Nabokov used to say, like, I will always live in short trousers and like, I will never not be a child. Do you feel that you adopt that in your own life? I try to, I try because I think the sort of adult mind when I live

in that it's just full of worry so much of the time and for me like going back to the child mind it is like it's a time of freedom and that's what I'm always trying to get back to. But of course what I write about is a lot of like sex and drugs. So I wouldn't say that it's... Like I don't write children's books. It goes back to your point about, you know, originality in an age where the algorithm sort of reigns supreme or, you know, it's changed the game massively. How do artists or creatives navigate that space? Because it's tricky. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I can only answer for myself. There are some people who I think do it so seamlessly with such, you know, aplomb. And then I think there are others

like me who really struggle with my relationship with social media. I don't use it a huge amount. I have loved it for connecting with readers. It has been just such a joy. That side of it I adore. It's very good for the public side of my job. I don't think it's very good for the private side of my job. Or your creativity. I always feel like anything that's extreme, it's usually everything that is and equally is not. So in some ways it's like terrible for my creativity, it's a time suck, it's a distraction, like it's a lot of what's on there is generic and mind-numbing and then on the other hand I've like found artists and photographers and like I've read people's experiences that I never would have known about and so it's like these two, all of us, I think, are trying to navigate those two extremes and that it deeply connects us to

other people and deeply disconnects us from others. I don't feel like I have any answers, to be honest. I'm just another person muddling through. And to go back to the process of the book and the characterization. So when you actually sort of conceptualized that scene and then you started developing it from there, what happened next? I was like, then I just wrote another scene. I think one of the secrets that I always try to tell, so many of my readers are young people in their 20s working on first books and I'm always like no one knows how to write a book. That's the whole point. When you write like nobody's first novel is not their first novel you know

so I had no idea how to write a novel so what I knew how to do was to write a scene like a self-contained scene so then I just wrote another self-contained scene and another scene and then slowly over time I was learning how to string them together. All writers have strengths and weaknesses. Learning what yours are is helpful. Like I could see fairly quickly that my strength was character and dialogue, that that just came naturally to me. And my weakness was plot and structure. Like those things I find not that interesting. Learning how to like plot a whole novel from start to finish was grueling for me and and really was it didn't just didn't come easily. Would it be fair to say that usually

people will be strong in one of those areas and weaker in another or and then perhaps need a bit of help? I'm sure I bet you like Franz and Ossady Smith is just great at them all. I don't know. God doesn't give with both hands. So, yeah, everyone feels that they have something that they're less strong at, definitely. And I also- And the problem with that, though, is creatives is then you think, oh, well, then that's when you sometimes get stuck. Oh, yeah, massively. But I also think the illusion that things that are natural should be easy.

I've just been breastfeeding my child. It's natural, it's not easy. I've had so many things in life. I feel that I had a gift for writing, but it was something that came naturally to me, but it's never been easy to write. And so anything that we try to do is going to be hard, I think. So I think the expectation that it shouldn't be hard sets us back. I think if we go into it being like, this is going to be tough, I think. So I think the expectation that it shouldn't be hard sets us back. I think if we kind of go into it being like, this is going to be tough, it's actually easier.

But I think when we see the finished product and like, for instance, your book is so beautifully put together in every way. And it feels like, oh, that just must have happened so romantically while she was, you know, in a coffee shop somewhere and just flowed out of her. So it's really, I think it's really important to sort of actually get into the truth of the creative process. So along that journey, like what were some of the points where you thought, I don't know where this is going, were there ever big periods where you just stopped writing? Did you have imposter syndrome? Did you want to self-sabotage? I mean, yes, yes, yes to all of the above. It was five years of my life between 25 and 30, which are hugely formative

years for anyone. For me, those are the years that I really became an adult. I just wasn't one before. And in the course of writing the novel, I got sober. I got sober when I was 26. So that was a huge life shift for me. And so while working on the book, there were so many times where I just had crippling self-doubt. I knew there was a problem, but I didn't know how to fix it. I knew I needed to do something, but I wasn't sure I had the skills to actually pull it off. I used to call it just kicking the can forward. I would just have these writing days where it's like, I didn't feel like I was doing anything particularly impressive, but I was just kicking the can along, you know, and just trying to write a little bit more on those days. And I had periods where I worked a lot on the book

and I had periods I didn't work on it at all. But I really believe the unconscious is always working on something if you've got something that I think it's muddling it over often. Can you expand on that a little bit? I feel like sometimes if I have something I'm working on and I'm stuck, I just put it down. I often go work on an essay or a short story, something that I can finish. I think when you're working on long projects, novels especially, they're counter to our culture and that they're not quick, you know, it's like, and it can be not finishing something year after year can't honestly be

disheartening. So I would go and find something else and I would work on that for a bit. But then often when I came back to the novel, it's something that had been so opaque, I had become clearer. And I just know that on some level, my unconscious mind had been moving through whatever it was. And I really think like sometimes you just need to go live as a writer. Like you need to just go have an experience, go on a date, have a meal, go for a walk,

have a shag, anything, you know, just like go do something and it can help with a blog. I always give this example from Cleopatra and Frankenstein where in the middle of the book, I knew that something would happen between Cleo and Frank that they couldn't recover from. Like I knew again, that was the story, but what was the situation?

What was the elevator in that moment? And I could not figure it out. Like I tried a bunch of different things, like a pregnancy that ended, you know, an affair that was really obvious and they all felt really forced and not good. And then I went on this is before I met my husband, I went on a first date with this guy that I was like horribly incompatible with. And because it's time I didn't drink, I like couldn't make normal conversations. So I was like, how do you deal with loneliness?

And it was Dave, I was like, how do you deal with loneliness, Dave? And he told me the story that he had moved to New York, he got a pet sugar glider and I'd never heard of it. What is a sugar glider? A sugar glider is a small marsupial animal, like a flying squirrel, basically, but cuter. I was like, I don't even know what that is. I hadn't heard of it either. This is what I'm talking about with fiction. You get to make stuff up. And he got this pet and it kept him company and that's how he dealt with loneliness. And like, I really, I suggest Googling sugar glider. They're a crazy looking animal.

And then when we were walking home, I knew I was never gonna see him again. And I turned, he walked in my door and I said, you know, what happened to your sugar glider? Do you still have it? And he told me what happened to his sugar glider. And what happened to his is what happened to the sugar glider. And what happened to his is what happened to the sugar glider in my book,

which is, I'm not gonna spoil it for the reader, but it's really fucked up and horrible. And then he just walked away into the night to like associate bad. And I went upstairs and I just was like, thank you, Dave, because I had it. I had the scene. I was like, yes, they are gonna get a pet sugar glider

and this thing is gonna happen. And it going to be the thing they can't recover from. But if I hadn't gone on that date and had that experience, I never would have had that scene. So I guess it's about really disconnecting as well from time. So I guess that's the thing sometimes. I mean, I have projects that I've down for years, but they still, it's interesting what you said about the subconscious or the unconscious is still working its way through it. And I'm a big believer as well, that ideas choose us, that dreams and visions, whatever, like they come to us for a reason and it's our responsibility to make them a reality.

And I think it's always a good measure that if you've had something that you've sat on for years and it's still brewing that you should do something about it rather than ones that just kind of you think one day, oh, that's a brilliant idea. And then a week later, like, actually, that was a terrible idea. I completely agree. And I think that's one of the things that is sometimes hard to explain about the creative process because we want to make it understandable or palatable or you know sort of a clean narrative but there is this element of like magic like where does it come

from and why I don't know when I you know my new novel Blue Sisters the three characters the sisters I write from their three perspectives it's a sort of triptych novel and it Sisters, the three characters, the sisters, I write from their three perspectives. It's a sort of triptych novel. And it's about the three sisters navigating life on the one year anniversary of their fourth sister's death. So what, how does that family look in the wake of this huge loss? And the three sisters are really, really different.

So the youngest is a model living in Paris, the middle sister is a boxer living in LA, and the eldest sister is a lawyer living in London. And they have these like vastly different ways of dealing with grief. And yet ultimately, it's only by sort of returning to each other that they can move forward and sort of fall back in love with their lives. I have two sisters, so I am one of four. I have a brother as well. But when I told my sisters that I was working on a novel about sisters, they were like, like oh so you're writing a book about us? It must be quite hard, you're like it's not about my life. And then when they read the book they were like who are these people? They were like we don't know

anyone like this and then definitely nothing like our family and I was like I don't know where they came from but they arrived fully formed like babies in a basket on my doorstep and I just had these sisters I had their voices, I knew them, I knew their background. And it was just, I don't know where that comes from. And it's such a gift when it does come. But then the hard work is like, for me, again, my character comes pretty easily to me,

but the hard work is like working out the structure of that novel and sort of the difference between where they started and where they ended took a while for me. Where do you think they come from? I don't know but at the moment I've been thinking about so much because when I was, I had my son but when I was trying to get pregnant I had a hard time getting pregnant and it was such a difficult period of my life you know and it was this kind of when you're trying to conceive actively people will say these

things like oh you, you know, just relax and it will happen. And the thing about conception that I kept kind of trying to wrap my mind around is that on the one hand, you know, it's the science and biology. And then there is just this kind of element of almost like magic. Like, why does it happen? Like, why can someone who desperately wants a child not be able to have one? Why can people get pregnant from being raped? You know, what, why is it like that? It makes no sense. Like, we're not in control of it.

And I was having to sort of live in that space and it was painful, but I also had to live with the reality of life, which is that like, life is inexplicable to us, that we lived in the center of the greatest mystery of all, which is like, why are we born and when are we gonna die? And nobody knows. And so the idea that the creative process would be, you know, absolved from mystery is absurd

because the creative process is like life itself. You give life to characters and so they come and they go in the same way that we are given our own lives, which is arbitrary and inexplicable often. And on that, because you know, this in essence is a spirituality podcast. So I'm really fascinated by the intersection between creativity and spirituality. And I kind of see those two things as synonymous with each other for all the reasons that you just mentioned.

But I think a lot of people are like, I'm not creative or don't feel that they resonate with that. So I guess the question is twofold, like do you have a spiritual practice that's sort of interweaved with your creative one? And what are your some of your thoughts and philosophies on that? I love this idea of creativity and spirituality being synonymous because I completely agree. And I think in some ways because both of them are faith-based and require us to live in the unknown and that can be really, really hard.

I think staying in a place where I don't know what's going to happen, I don't know what the right answer is, but being open to whatever is sort of being shown to me is a practice and it's one that I have to really work at, to be honest. In terms of my own spiritual practice, for me, it's very related to being sober. In recovery, we sort of say that addiction is a three-fold disease. It's mental, it's physical, and then I would say,

most importantly, it's spiritual. And so when I was using and drinking and doing drugs, I think so much of what I was looking for was the spiritual solution to my life, was this feeling of connectedness to something greater than myself, to a purpose, to a sense of deep, unconditional love. And so, so much of my life as a sober person is connecting to that, is connecting to that great source of love, which for me, I do through recovery. It's a big part of my life is being connected to other sober people and doing service in that way, you know, helping other people who are looking

to get sober. And then I see writing as a sort of active service in some ways, because it's helping, I think, to mitigate the sort of universal issue of loneliness. I think spirituality, religion, which are separate things, but seek in many ways to solve the same issue, which is the disconnection of the human spirit from each other and to bring us closer, you know, bring us into harmony together. My guiding light when I'm writing always has been like, would this make someone feel less lonely? Like if someone was struggling with this, would they feel in some ways, you know, loved by reading this? Which doesn't mean that I

don't write about people doing like fucked up things, you know, loved by reading this. Which doesn't mean that I don't write about people doing like fucked up things, you know, but I always try to write them in a loving way and that's a spiritual thing for me. I'm also curious to know because you spoke about getting sober and you touched on that that was happening whilst you were writing the book. How much did the book mirror your own experience or inform your life and vice versa? I mean in terms of just like biography versus fiction like you know obviously everyone Cleo is the character that's the most like me on the surface but Frank is the character that gets sober you know a man in his mid-40s so on the surface very different to me. I'm always interested in taking something I've experienced in some way and then giving it to

someone, giving it to a character that does something completely different with it. Like, what does it look like for a man to get sober and made way through his life? In many ways, he was dealing with all the same issues as me, but of course the result is somewhat different. Which I can confess, because sometimes I think that the subconscious can write its way into things and then you're like, like oh that was actually what I needed to do do you know what I mean? I was a thousand percent that like I had no idea that I was writing about addiction I thought I was writing about people in New York who wanted to have a good time and then when I reread those scenes because it was only a year that I worked on the book Not So Good

but a lot of what I wrote was about doing drugs and drinking. And it wasn't just that for literal sense. It was about people who were cripplingly lonely and lost, looking for ways to connect and the way that they were trying to connect and left them feeling more disconnected and bereft, you know, so that was the vicious cycle. And I remember my teacher at the time was Rick Moody, who was, you know, openly I think, 35 years sober. And I got into a point in the novel where Cleo, the character, does something painfully

and violently self-destructive. And it had not been what I planned for her. That actually wasn't what I wanted. I thought it was always too dark for the novel. I didn't really want it to go there. But that is where she went. And I kind of couldn't control it. And I remember Rick, my teacher, saying, you need to try to work out what's happening on the

unconscious for you beneath the surface, because clearly there's something that's pretty destructive. And then I got sober maybe a month later. So it was that. It was definitely. It goes to show actually what a healing practice creativity can be. That's really fascinating that that then really informed your personal journey. I often don't know what it is that I'm writing about until I've gotten to the end of the book. Like with Blue Sisters, I thought I was writing, for me I thought I was writing such pure fiction because I was like these characters are nothing like anyone I know. But I realized that what I was writing about under the surface, one was, I was trying to navigate my own sibling relationships.

I was trying to work through the intensity, especially between my closest sister and age. And in therapy, it's always about the parents. I don't know why we don't talk more about siblings. I'm sorry. I know. I mean, birth order, like where you are, if you're the eldest sibling, the middle, the youngest,

these things are hugely important, you know, and your parents will hopefully, if things go in the natural order, die before you do. Only your sibling will know you from the earliest phase of your life till the very end. It will be a peer to you through every single phase of life. It's a completely unique relationship. And the opening line of my novel is, a sister is not a friend because it isn't friendship. It's more complicated for me than friendship. It's deeper and stickier. And I guess once I got to the end of the book, I was like, wow, I was writing about that. I was doing it through fiction. I wasn't writing about my own sister, literally.

But I was trying to understand myself better. Maybe perhaps to prepare myself for a child, I have no idea, but only when I got to the end, because there's a big question in the book of whether one of the main characters, Avery, wants to have a baby and she comes to a different conclusion than I did. But I realised I was working through that in the novel as well. That's where the motherhood was for you. The thing is, I always knew that I wanted to have a child

So I didn't feel the ambivalence of this character feels she feels true true true like she's torn between wanting to give this thing to her wife who does want a baby and Suspecting that perhaps by being the eldest sister She's already experienced a lot of motherhood by kind of always having to look after her younger siblings So we come to different conclusions, but I think I always knew I wanted to have a child, but I was afraid of that change. What you need as a writer is independence and freedom. I would say those are the things that you give up to the quickest when you have a baby.

And also sort of dawns on you that you will never, you feel like you'll never feel independent and free again in the way that you once were. Well, because this love, you know, to love someone so much that I really felt like I couldn't, like when my son was in the NICU, which was so terrifying. I remember feeling like what it was such a gift to have this immediate love for him. But it also felt honestly like a burden because I was like, Oh my god, like, I don't know that I could ever be happy again if something happened to him, but I was happy before him. And so it felt like, oh my god, and now I'm just gonna have to live the rest of my life loving this person so much.

I also felt like that, you know. I know, I know. And I just remember, I kept saying people like, are all parents just living with this crippling love at all times? How are people functioning? How do we have like politics and parties? Like, if there's people are parents. And they were like, you just learn to live with it. But you know, the cliche, your heart lives outside of your body once you mature. It's kind of, it's true. I get it. Yeah, that's really beautiful. But in terms of the ambivalence piece, I'm kind of curious about that because in a way, I think, you know, as a lot of our audience listeners are women, you know, to know that you definitely want motherhood is like, okay, well, that's done, that's the route,

and hopefully it will be straightforward, but there is ways in case it's not and then there's people that just know they don't want children which is becoming increasingly more popular but for people that are sort of quite ambivalent about it it's confusing. Massively. It's also I mean I think for women it's it's I've been talking about this so much it's also what my third novel is partly about it there's this phenomenal sense of, I think, injustice that for women we have so little time as adults to make this decision and that we are having to make it in the period of our lives where our careers are usually, you know, reaching

a point of like real fecundity, you know, we're busy and you know, it feels like a sexist social construct and yet it's a biological issue that's what's so strange about it like the fact that there are men having kids in their fucking 80s makes me just want to like just rip my hair out as so many women including members of my family are having to navigate wondering if they'll ever be able to do this because they have this very brief window of time in a lifespan, which is already taken up by many other things in your thirties to meet a partner, to, you know, to make this decision for it to go smoothly,

which, you know, in my case, it didn't, it doesn't for many people. It's so desperately unfair. And yet it just, it is, you know, and we're, we're doing our best, you know, with science, I think, to try to counteract that with egg freezing and IVF. And thank God, but they're not small things to go through for women. It's not like a casual thing to just freeze your eggs and have to go through IVF while working full-time,

while navigating a relationship, or aging parents, or friendships. It's something that I think about a lot. And I've thought about a lot when I realized that I wanted to have a child because I just, I felt, for me, I felt sure and there was some safety in that. But then I had to face the fact that for me, I might not have been able to have a child. It wasn't easy for me and I had fertility issues and I had a miscarriage.

And then I just remember wishing like, I wish that I didn't want this, you know, I wish that I was free of this yearning, so that I could just live my, frankly, quite nice life, you know, like I have a great life. I wish that I could just be happy without this. And I maybe I could have got there, but, and I know there are many people who have to really face that. But it's, it's phenomenal. It's probably the hardest. It's the number one reason I'm seeing couples break up at the moment. If one person wants a child and one person doesn't, it's too much for either person to compromise on. You can't have a child if you don't want one and you

can't give it up if you want one. It's not fair. And it's just the number one thing, it seems to me, that it's very, very difficult to navigate as a couple if you come if you are very sure in opposite directions. And it's probably one of those things that you go into a relationship or perhaps thinking yeah probably maybe I don't know like that's what I guess we do and then when it actually comes to it you're like actually I don't know how do you want that? Exactly and then as a man you could think when you're 56 you could need someone who's 36 and be like, okay, great. You know, actually, like, I did it, I traveled, I had my career, I feel like I kind of, I'm ready. And as a woman, you just, you know, you do not have

that option at the moment. And it's just, I just wish we did. I wish we did so badly. And I hope, I hope we will one day. I started this conversation talking about like honesty and like truth. And that's probably one of the hardest things in the world is to have a truth revealed to yourself that is not the one you want. But I have to listen to the voice inside of me that's saying this just true thing that's undeniable. That voice of truth inside of you is clearer and louder

and you're able to listen to it because so much of a spiritual life I think is pausing and finding moments of peace to really kind of check in with your inner life. Yeah, which again goes back to those sort of intersections between what you were speaking about of imagination going off being just going for walks, being, you know, just listening to music. That in itself is kind of a spiritual practice, isn't it? It's just creating enough space for the downloads, whatever you want to call them to come in.

Listening to what's true for you and living by it, even if it's in direct opposition to what someone else believes is right for you or what society at large tells us is right for us. What would your advice be for people that are having that kind of thought or feeling but are too afraid to do anything about it? You have to talk about it. I think conversation is the kind of practice ground in which we learn how to act. Such a big part of my life it's just like it's talking on the phone and talking to people. And I just like, working through what's going on with me. And as those things become clear, sometimes I'm like, I can see that I have to do something,

but I'm way too frightened to do it. And that's fine, like I can acknowledge that, but then I'll just kind of keep returning to it. Not, I found for myself personally, that trying to figure it out in my head doesn't work. Like I need the input of other people that I trust. Probably one of the great gifts of recovery is like is having people in my life, right?

I like the way they live their life. I value their values. I think you'd be surprised though, like actually, cause it's having people to have those conversations with, but people that you can trust that aren't gonna just project their own experience and say, oh no, no, no, like you should carry on doing what's making you miserable and it will eventually

feel fine. Well, this is what's interesting. I think it's like you can hear the seven different opinions in the room that are going to reflect, there's going to be so much more about the seven other people, not about you. And that's the spiritual thing of then having the practice of being able to go inside and you can collect you can collate all that information and then you can feel it's like a tuning fork like what has struck and what is off. So you can also sense when your tuning fork is like that was not it. Yeah and that can be helpful like sometimes I need to see examples of exactly what I don't

want to do like I have friends that I dearly love who are in relationships where I'm like that is not what I want I would never want that but I have friends that I dearly love who are in relationships where I'm like, that is not what I want. I would never want that, but I would still love that person. But for me, I'm like, you know, I can talk to them about it and they'll sometimes give me advice and I'm like, no, I'm going to lie. And I think like that voice, like the inner voice, that what's right for me, I kind of, I fine tune it by hearing other voices, but always that has to be that time afterwards of returning to self. And how important has sobriety been for accessing that? For me, I couldn't do it without it. I am not someone who can moderate. That was something

I just had to, I've accepted that about myself a long time ago and honestly, like, thank fucking God. I'm so glad to know that. Did you ever want me to ask you, because when did you get sober? How old were you? I was 26. It was always about the way it made me feel. And for me, the key has always been shame. I just lived with a tremendous amount of shame when I was drinking. I would behave in ways that were so counter to who I wanted to be and hoped that I was. One of the things that I was told is that guilt is for what you've done and guilt can

be healthy, useful. You know, we change our behavior because of guilt. We cannot grow and change from a place of feeling that we're undeserving and bad. And so living with that level of shame was just unbearable for me. I just wouldn't wish it on any person in the world. Has it been completely transformative to you in every way?

Really it has for me, but because I got really involved with a kind of sober community in New York and so many of my best friends are sober, many members of my immediate family are sober, so I'm lucky in that sense that it's normalized in my family, although of course we are all like raging addicts,

so it comes with its own issues. You know, it's also a complicated issue to have in your family, but. And so, and for me, you know, addiction is progressive, it gets worse usually, you know, but I think sobriety is progressive. Like for me, sobriety has gotten like deeper and more interesting the longer I've done it. I just, I love sober people.

I love hearing their stories. I'm like, I love watching people get sober. It's like, it's incredible. It's a miraculous thing to see someone come into this program and just be so bereft of hope. But you just watch like the light come on in people's eyes. You see their lives get bigger and better. It's just, it's amazing.

It's like, as someone who's kind of a people person, it's the ultimate people experience. Actually, you know, so many people that come on this show are sober. It's quite interesting. Well, I think it's like there's so many different ways to be spiritual, but it's like, you know, Ram Dass, who I listen to a lot, who experimented so much with acid and mushrooms and all these different things. His ultimate conclusion was that sobriety was the highest spiritual state that he could find. You know, it was the deepest level of connection to a spiritual world. And I always thought that was really, it made me feel happy when I heard it.

What are your thoughts on addiction? Do you think addiction is something that we just have that's sort of in our DNA or that it's through life experience or a bit of both? I wish I knew. I really don't. I don't know. I think like in my case, I can kind of see like I mean, I come from a long line of addicts and alcoholics and most immediate members of my family have this. So it seems it lends itself pretty well to the argument that there's a genetic component. But there are also people who are like, I'm the only one in my family, everyone else is normal. And for some some reason I'm just like this. And I think many people who have addiction issues have trauma in their life.

It just seems that they got hand in hand. And yet there are also people who are like, no, I had a great childhood, felt safe all my life. For some reason, when I go to the pub, I just get mugged and wasted. But for me, I think it was a combination of like, why I drank was because I couldn't handle my feelings. Like I just couldn't handle how I felt about things. And I drank to feel, when I felt good, I drank to feel better.

When I felt bad, I drank to feel better. And once I got sober, I had to really start to deal with all the stuff underneath the drinking. And that's been like the lifelong experience of sobriety for me that I think will probably be never ending in some ways. I mean, I could talk about it forever because it's such a slippery, complicated thing, addiction, but it's also the other side, the flip side of addiction is connection and like beautiful deep connections with other people. And it's like, I just love talking to other addicts. I'm like, I'm just obsessed with them.

I just like, I just love getting in a quarter with them and being like, did you ever do this? Did you ever face yourself here? I drop here. I'm sharing stories and anecdotes. And everything that when it happened to me in my life I felt like I'll never tell anyone about that. That's the most shameful embarrassing thing ever. I can't believe I did that. Like that's disgusting. It's like you talk about it with someone else who gets it and we are just cackling away. It's like so healing and lovely. It really is. It's the funniest thing. Cause also it's like this thing that you have this understanding of each other, especially as a past

version of you that today if people met you, they would never know. I know, like my husband Henry's never seen me drunk. And like when I tell him what it was like, he's like, I can't imagine. I don't like that. Like, I just can't imagine that. And I'm like, I hope you never see it. You know, I'm just kidding. I'm like, I completely relate.

The final thing that I wanted to ask you, because obviously this book is being made into a TV series. Did you have the intention for it to be made into a TV series? And what has that whole process been like? No, I definitely did not have the intention. I mean, it was a miracle for me that it even became a book. I mean, I just because I worked for so many years, I didn't have an agent, I didn't have a publisher, you know, there's no guarantee that it would ever come out and then it got rejected by so many publishers.

That I just, yeah, it got rejected by 30. It was such a long, slow process. So no, there was never a feeling of like, oh, it's gonna be a book and it's gonna be a TV show. I had so little confidence. When you got rejected that many times, did that ever make you think, oh, maybe this is, maybe I should not do something with this, you know, because again,

it's that thing of you think that these things just kind of perfectly fall into place and that there was like everyone battling to have the book. So I'm always fascinated when there's that kind of experience of initial rejection. I knew that I was in Dululu, which was like an important thing to try and help me. There's also like, am I just completely Dululu? Yeah, exactly. That would be a normal assumption because the editors that rejected it had really taken the time to write how much they loved the book and how much they loved the characters. And I just kept hearing the same thing over and over, which is that the structure and the plot wasn't working.

So it was really disheartening and I felt really disappointed because I felt like the book was ready, but it wasn't. But luckily there were two editors who had been, it was kind of like an await list at a college. They were like, it's close, but it's not there. And if you rewrite it, we'll read it one more time. So it was disappointing. It wasn't the shiny publishing story I'd hoped for with like a bidding war and like a million dollar book deal or whatever,

but it wasn't bereft of hope. I felt like, okay, I just need to try again. And then with the TV show, we're in the process at the moment. It's with Warner Brothers and Brownstone, and it's really, I think it'll be such a cool show. So I really hope it's a big hit. I can totally see it as a show. I think it's really exciting. What is the sort of timeline for it? I honestly, I don't know. I'm hoping in the next few months,

it'll be with the network and we'll be able to get rolling and maybe start shooting later this year, early next year. None of it's overnight. Amazing. Well, Koko, thank you so much for joining me today. I feel like you shared so many wonderful pieces of advice across a lot of different areas that I think our audience are gonna really really enjoy. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Saturn Returns and I hope that you enjoyed it and it's left you feeling inspired and if you want to join the Saturn Returns

community where there is a big focus on the creative journey, we have launched a sub stack called You Are Not Alone and we will put a link in the show notes and it's a place where we can discuss episodes of Saturn Returns, we can share things with the community. It's always been something that I I wanted to bring to life and so I'm very excited that we've started this recently. And I've really enjoyed the platform that it provides for my own creative expression and to share everything with you guys. So head to our sub stack if that is something you're interested in.

And as always, remember, you are not alone. Sending lots of love.