“A sister is not a friend.” So begins Coco Mellors’s sophomore novel, “Blue Sisters,” whose three adult protagonists are in a constant fight — with one another, with their various addictions, with their own worst selves. For Mellors, it’s these fights that define sisterhood, as “tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential” as an umbilical cord: “You’re part of each other, right from the start.”
In lush, cozy prose, Mellors guides us into the lives of Avery, Bonnie and Lucky Blue, reuniting to clean out their childhood apartment in New York City on the first anniversary of their sister Nicky’s death. Between the ages of 26 and 33, all three lead extreme lives that sometimes feel out of step with a domestic novel that otherwise seems to celebrate the beauty of the mundane. Avery, the oldest, lives with her wife in London, where she became a successful corporate lawyer after quitting heroin. The second sister, Bonnie, is a champion boxer turned bouncer in Los Angeles whose “drugs of choice are sweat and violence.” The youngest, Lucky, has been a model since she was 15, and lives in Paris. “She has said the words I need a drink 132 times so far this year.”
Nicky’s life was comparatively quiet: The sensitive sister with “a carnival of feelings she never tried to hide,” she lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where she taught high school English “10 blocks from where she grew up,” and longed to become a mother. As the sisters reckon with losing her — to an overdose of the painkillers she took in secret, for the chronic pain caused by her endometriosis — they must also come to terms with their own relationships to addiction, which “whirred through all of them like electricity through a circuit.”
Avery’s “boring,” perfectly constructed, sober life starts to crack under the weight of her grief when she cheats on her wife, Chiti — a 40-year-old therapist who pressures her to have a child — with Charlie, a poet she meets in Alcoholics Anonymous. Lucky’s 20-something, fashion-party debauchery — doing drugs in bathrooms, hooking up with strangers, living “in the moment and just a few seconds ahead” — only leaves her feeling more alone, wanting “to feel nothing — to be nothing.”
Bonnie, who’s never had a drink in her life, describes herself as addicted to “pain”; and in the aftermath of finding Nicky’s dead body — “she looked like something that had just spilled, like a vase of violets tipped over” — she takes her rage out on a racist patron at the bar she works at, beating him to a pulp. Even back in New York, the same physical energy emerges when Bonnie tackles Lucky to the ground in an effort to keep her sober (“she had been too rough, just like when they were kids”), and then again in an explosive fight with both of her sisters that begins over a T-shirt Nicky saved from a Spice Girls reunion tour they all attended as kids.
For all of Avery’s A.A. rhetoric about giving herself up to a “higher power,” it’s Bonnie who confesses to actually believing in one, a godlike figure who is “someone for me to talk to,” she tells them self-consciously at the end of the book, after the three have made up from the T-shirt fight. “I think they’re looking after Nicky until we get to see her again.”
Whether or not Avery and Lucky believe that too, the conversation itself has its own power, like the “fit of giggles” the three fall into during Nicky’s funeral, “inopportune and inappropriate” but a necessary comfort — “Nicky would have laughed too.”
Though not all of Mellors’s metaphors land (addicts are compared to mice; both “didn’t have collarbones”) and her prose can collapse into sentimentality, she is nonetheless able to capture the ferality, stickiness and beauty of both sisterhood and grief. As Avery tells Lucky about A.A.: “Yes, the slogans were cheesy, but they came in surprisingly handy.” The words have their roles, and the sisters have theirs.
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