As the follow-up to her debut bestseller hits the shelves, Cleopatra and Frankenstein author Coco Mellors talks about overcoming alcoholism, the devastating loss she experienced as her career hit a new high and why she feels so lucky to be a sober mother Coco Mellors. Photo: Zoe Potkin By anyone’s measure, Coco Mellors’s mid-20s were incredibly eventful. At 25, and consumed with a desire to write fiction since childhood, she began writing her first novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein .
A year later, London-born Mellors decided to seek help for alcohol addiction and has been sober ever since. Two years later, she met her now-husband, Henry. “It was kind of amazing,” Mellors says, of those fateful few years, via a Zoom call from her Los Angeles home.
“I mean, getting sober massively helped me on a completely practical level — I am not someone who was productive when hungover multiple days a week, when you’re just trying to get through the day. [In getting sober] I got a little more time because I wasn’t out until 4am anymore, and was going for yoga at 8am and thinking, ‘Wow, I can’t believe people live like this.’.
