Rachel Schwartzmann: Welcome to Slow Stories. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann, the founder of CONNECT(ED)ITORIAL and the host and creator of this podcast. For those of you just joining in, Slow Stories is a series that deep dives into the rising slow content movement. In each of these episodes, I interview brand builders, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals who share what slow content means in the context of what they’re building—and why slowing down and creating thoughtful stories is more important than ever.

This episode begins with a story from writer Alyssa Natoci, who shares a ritual that brings her back to the present. Here’s more from Alyssa.

Alyssa Natoci: My name is Alyssa Natoci, and I’m a writer based in northern Michigan. I also run a workshop called Avid, which focuses on finding ways to harness the magic of our daily rituals in order to ground ourselves, slow down, and stop scrolling.

A ritual that I find myself turning to in order to slow down is the process of making my morning tea and then watching the waterfowl that live on the lake behind my house as I sip. Making tea is an analog process that requires calm, attention, and patience. I like to stay present, to take in the aroma of the herbs as they steep. Then, I choose my favorite mug and sit by the window.

Mornings on the lake are always full of life. There are swans, mallards, mergansers, and goldeneyes who glide through the waters, diving for food and teaching their hatchlings how to find nourishment. Sometimes, the water is rough—birds bobbing and bouncing on the waves. And other times, it’s calm and clear enough to see their little webbed feet propel them across the shore. But day after day, they show up. Because to them, the water is their universe, and it’s an amazing reminder of the relentlessness of life and how we must all always show up, stay present in this world, and continue to nourish ourselves with what truly brings us a sense of energy and purpose.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Thank you so much again to Alyssa for sharing. You can learn more about Alyssa’s work online at https://alyssanatoci.com/. Now, here’s my conversation with Coco Mellors.
Coco Mellors: I'm Coco Mellors. Outside of being a writer—well, I'm a daughter, and I'm a sister, I'm a wife. I'm a sober woman. I think [that] is a big part of how I identify in the world, and I feel very, very connected to that community. I'm a big reader. I take a lot of imagination walks where I walk around, listen to music, and imagine things. That's something I do almost every day. [Laughs] And the things that I value are curiosity and expansion. So, I try to live a life where I give myself space to have things not be planned and to have my imagination move freely, which isn't always the easiest thing. [Laughs] And I really try my best to be kind in the world and to leave situations better than when I found them—with a lot of help from other people. I think I need a lot of help just to be a sort of normal person in the world, not causing destruction... but I try!

Rachel Schwartzmann: I think that's so interesting, though ... your walks—you call them imagination walks. What's your relationship with your imagination these days? I would imagine it ebbs and flows.

Coco Mellors: Yes, it really does. I think I am someone inclined towards being quite anxious. And I notice that when I am anxious, I busy myself. So, I pack more into my life in order to avoid feeling. And I think, part of, for me, being an alcoholic and also being a writer and someone who's pretty sensitive, I do a lot to get out of feeling. [Laughs] That's something I notice. I feel very deeply, and I think it makes me uncomfortable. So I try to rush and be busy to get away from that deeper level of feeling, to stay closer to the surface where things are a little, maybe less intense. I find that when I do that, my imagination is not free in the same way. I mean, the unconscious is always working and always moving through for me: story and ideas.

If I spend my whole day chatting on the phone, doing a million meetings, packing stuff in, trying to earn as much money as possible, trying to exercise, trying to do this, it's not free. It doesn't have that time. Thinking time is so important—not just as a writer, but I think as a person. Just time in which you are not doing anything but allowing your mind to move. I've just found that if I go for a walk, I put my phone on airplane mode, and I listen to music; it's time when I get to really do that, where nothing else can intrude.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Can you walk in LA, though? That's a serious question, too. [Laughs]

Coco Mellors: Well, I live in Venice at the moment, and so it's very walkable in that area because I live by the beach. So I walk along the beach, and I walk along the canals. I do the same sort of walk almost every day. And as my feet move, my mind sort of falls into [a] pattern with that. Then I sort of disappear off into other worlds. If I don't do it, I really miss it. I learned to drive this year, and when I drive, I imagine things. But I've had a couple of not fender benders but bumper bumpers. [Laughs] And so I think I need to keep my imagination wandering mostly when I'm walking and not driving.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, I actually don't know how to drive because I grew up in New York, but I feel like I would fall into the same sort of trap of daydreaming on the road.

Coco Mellors: Oh my gosh, my driving instructor said that to me. He was like, "You have to pay attention to the road and not to the people along the side of the road." And I think when you don't grow up driving [and] when you're in a car, it's like a lovely time to just observe, and you sort of feel free. I really struggle because I'm like, "The road is not as interesting!" My interest is always geared towards people, not the stop sign, [Laughs] so I'm retraining myself.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, it's definitely evident that you have an inherent curiosity and interest in people. Cleopatra and Frankenstein, I know it's been described as a new New York love story—you might have even said that—but I really just think it's a love story to people. And on the subject of LA and New York, I'd love to have you talk about your time in New York and also share what you had to leave behind there in order to be able to create distance and capture those feelings or memories on the page.

Coco Mellors: Yes. I mean, New York has an incredible weight in my life. I moved to New York when I was fifteen, and I left it when I was thirty, which had a kind of symmetry in it, you know, it was truly half my life when I left. And I think moving to a city as a teenager is a unique experience because I think anyone who's moved knows—at any age—that experiences are heightened by moving. You're sort of hyper-aware of everything because you're learning a new place, and you're trying to work out if you're happy there, if you can be happy if you like it. Then doing that while also being fifteen [Laughs] and all the hormones and intensity and the kind of operatic scale of emotion—which is true to adolescence— those two things combined meant that my introduction to New York just felt kind of ginormous to me. It just felt like a ginormous city, a ginormous thing to experience.

The fifteen years that I lived there were such incredibly formative years because it was my adolescence and then my very early adulthood. Just my experience of being there, for me, it's a city of people. You're on top of people all the time—quite literally in apartment buildings or under them. And so, it was stimulating. I felt if you're curious about people, it's just the greatest to live in ever. [Laughs] There's just this never-ending supply of inspiration around you at all times. I found when I turned thirty that actually—I had finished my book at that point. I had finished Cleopatra and Frankenstein, and I had written it in my evenings and on my weekends while working pretty much full-time as a copywriter. The way that I wrote that book was with a kind of energy and a hunger, and a fear, and a drive that was beginning to kind of hurt me, I felt. What I was running on was not filling me up anymore. It was starting to kind of empty me out. So, my husband and I decided to go to LA for six months, and I just ended up staying. [Laughs] I feel like a traitor because I still love New York best, but I like life in LA at this point.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I understand that. I've also moved quite a bit. When I say I grew up in New York, it's the place that I've been the longest, so it feels the most like home. But I was born in San Francisco. I moved around California. I had a short stint in Texas when I was a kid. And then I've moved quite a bit here. I think I've lived in sixteen addresses in total.

Coco Mellors: Wow. OK, that's a lot.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. Everything you're saying it really resonates, especially coming to New York at a pivotal age. I was twelve when I got here.

Coco Mellors: Oh, wow.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah! As you were speaking, just all of those feelings of rushing emotion and uncertainty took me back. It's so interesting because I think you captured such a distinct moment in New York's collective history. It was pre-social media, I believe, so the way that people were sort of relating to each other hadn't been completely appended.

I do want to get into talking about the book, but in terms of stories overall, first, I'm wondering if there is a story that you've come across recently—whether it's been an article, a poem, a book, or even a song—that has made you slow down or sort of impacted your relationship with friendship, love, or wellbeing?

Coco Mellors: Hmm. Gosh, that's such an interesting question. I read a novel maybe a month or two ago—it's a debut by Juhea Kim. It's called Beasts of a Little Land, and it's a beautiful sort of sweeping, incredible history of Korea in the 1940s when they were under Japanese rule and their fight for independence. My husband had read it—he bought it cause of the beautiful book cover, actually—and then he recommended it to me. And it took me quite a long time to read. I'm usually a fairly fast reader. It took me a long time—I think just my own novel was coming out; I was also really luxuriating in this story that was in a different time in a place I've never been but had so many emotions in it that I felt—that it was such an incredible reading experience I loved that feeling of being totally, I don't know, I just felt swept away by it.

And then, it was such a gift because I ended up going to a literary festival and then being on a panel with the author, Juhea—we were on a panel together about being first-time authors. I've actually never really had that happen before where I've read someone's book, I know nothing about them, I didn't really look into her, and then I met her! I got to chat with her, and then we had this dinner that was probably like six hours—it was another long dinner to reflect [on] this long reading process of her book. So that formed a friendship. So not only did that book—the friendships in that book—make me think deeply about female friendship, but then my own friendship I formed with Juhea has kind of continued that exploration... It's probably one of the things I'm most delighted by this year: meeting her, reading that book, and now getting to recommend it to other people.

Rachel Schwartzmann: So lovely. I'll definitely be adding it to my very expansive TBR list.

Coco Mellors: I know. It's never-ending.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I'm just looking around at my office, which I've deemed the TBR office because all of the shelves are just filled with books that I haven't read yet.

Coco Mellors: Oh, I want a TBR office. [Laughs] That sounds nice!

Rachel Schwartzmann: My partner is like, you know, "Before you add to it, maybe get through a shelf or two." [Laughs] But you know, in terms of looking at all these incredible books, I want to talk about your book, Cleopatra and Frankenstein. And I actually want to start with the inspiration behind the title. That alone is an element that gripped me, but I'm curious if the figures Cleopatra and Frankenstein came to you first, or were they merely a spinoff off of your characters, Cleo and Frank?

Coco Mellors: The title is so interesting. I always thought that if I wrote a book, I would know the title—just know it from the moment I started. And this book had many titles before it was called Cleopatra and Frankenstein. It was actually my mother who read the book and suggested that title, which felt [was] very fitting since she's also the person who named—or titled—me. She took it from the opening chapter of the novel. These two characters, Cleo and Frank, meet each other, and they have this kind—I hope witty—banter and this sort of electrifying chemistry. They're sort of teasing each other. He asks her name, and she says, "Cleo." And he immediately says, "Oh Cleopatra, the original undoer of men." You know, he's very loquacious, Frank. He's a copywriter and an ad man. He's just very flirtatious. I think his kind of locus for play and fun is language. But Cleo rises to the challenge, you know? And she says, "Oh Frank, like, what is Frank short for?" And he's like, "Frank is never short for anything. It's not a name that's short for something." And she says, "Well, Frankfurter ... and then Frankenstein." And he says, "Oh, Frankenstein. Yes. That's who I am. I'm the maker of monsters."

It's so interesting when you go back to the first chapter, and you realize, "Oh, gosh, the whole story was already in there, right from the very first meeting." But I had no idea. So it ended up being the perfect title because those figures, you know, this sort of the monstrous Frankenstein—although, of course, in the story, Frankenstein is the scientist who creates the monster. Then, Cleopatra is upheld in many ways as this beacon of femininity, desire, and empowerment. It's like the shadow selves or the masks the two of them wear. So when they first meet each other, they're playing roles. They're playing a part; they're pulling on these old stories. As the novel progresses, Cleopatra and Frankenstein fall away, and we're left with just Cleo and Frank—messy, human, in some ways special, and in some ways totally ordinary, Cleo and Frank.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It's really compelling. And the way you build on their stories also through the lens of their circle of friends and lovers. Would you be open to introducing a few of the other ancillary characters?

Coco Mellors: Yes. I mean, just tying back to that, like deep love and curiosity in people. When I started writing the book, I worked like an animal sort of snuffling in the dark, looking for the next scent. [Laughs] I have no idea what's coming. So, I never planned for the book to only be about Cleo and Frank. I wrote one chapter, and then I wrote a wedding chapter where a number of their friends and family members were in attendance. And I just started to get curious about some of the other people that were there.

So there's a character, Quentin, who is Cleo's best friend, who is a very prickly character, kind of spikey. I was really interested in what he would be like, not in the group setting—when he drops his guard a little bit, when we see him a little more vulnerable. I'm always curious about that in light. I love the difference between how we are public, private, in the group, or one-on-one, alone. I followed him in the next chapter into another moment of his life where none of the other characters see him.

Then Frank has a little sister who is half Black; she's mixed race. I was really interested in what her experience would be in this community. So I followed her into a part of her life, separate from Cleo and Frank, and it just kind of kept happening over and over again. My attention would get pulled by these characters: Santiago, the Peruvian chef who makes their wedding lunch. I ended up writing from his perspective in the second half of the book, and I just loved living in his head. He had such a sweetness and a kind of innocence that I hadn't expected. And I just fell in love with him.

I worked on this book for five years, so what made it interesting to me was the freedom to think, "I get to live with someone else again and again. I get to inhabit all these different voices and ways of seeing and perspectives [and] histories." It's thrilling. It's what makes writing fiction, I think, so incredibly exciting.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah, I mean, it was just compelling all throughout. And as a reader, sometimes it can be a bit jolting to go into somebody else's story for a moment when you think it's going to be a little bit more linear, but I found that that's not true to life. So it was refreshing to get a sense of the through-line through the lens of these other friends and family members.

You did such a wonderful job of going into age differences, race, identity, and the like, but I'm curious what you think the responsibility is of writing a story that tackles these different lived experiences and also the delicate explorations of mental illness, addiction, and those conversations as well?

Coco Mellors: Yes, it's not something I took on lightly. You know, I think for this book, it would not have been true to the world to write characters who were all white, all straight, or all in their twenties. That felt, to me, like it would've done a disservice to the community that I was trying to write about. But of course, if I was going to write a character who had a very different lived experience to myself—who, you know, was white and in my twenties—it's something that I didn't ever want to assume about someone else's life. I don't know what it's like to live as a man, as a Black person, as a queer person.

So the way that I wrote the book is for every character that had a different lived experience to my own; there was usually a handful of people in my own life who were of that identity or background who read those chapters while I was writing them and would give feedback if there was anything that like really kind of out of line or not true. And then, I also had a sensitivity reader at the very end of the process, read the book very specifically through that lens to make sure that I wasn't using tropes in literature that white authors sometimes use that are diminishing, cliched, or trite. That was extremely helpful. And there wasn't a huge amount of changes that came out, but the changes that I did make, though small, I hope had a good effect. I'm very pleased to have done that.

I also felt [that] New York is a city—like we were talking about—where people are on top of each other. So, it always had to be a group novel for me. It had to be about the way we affect each other, whether we want to or not, that we don't live in a sort silo. I was just so interested and curious about that. It's a marriage story, but how does a marriage affect the people [who are] not in the marriage, as well as the people who are in the couple? It was sort of fascinating for me to explore.

I also think I always started with an emotion that was true to my own experience. So, I started with emotional truth, and I would give that emotional truth to another character. I would see what they would do with it with their own life experience. So, every character has part of me in them. Although so many of them do things [and] have lived things that I've never ever lived. So it's kinda like emotional nonfiction, while the plot and the characters are very, very, very, truly fiction.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I think in another interview that I listened to, you mentioned that the book is an emotional biography, and I wonder how much can be said in terms of it being a spoken biography, specifically in relation to the dialogue, which is incredible and really keeps you engaged throughout.

Coco Mellors: I think all writers have their sweet spots, you know? We all get our gifts in this life, and we get our challenges. And I would say, as a writer, one of the things that come more easily to me is [writing] dialogue. And I don't know where that comes from or why. I speak no other languages. My Spanish is embarrassing. I learned French as a child; I barely remember any of it. So, I don't have an ear for languages, but I do somehow seem to have an ear for dialogue in the English language. I can listen to a conversation and hear the cadences of how two different people speak and the different slang they use. I can feel it. I can almost feel it in my body, and then I can replicate it.

I'm in a writer's group, and we laugh so hard because some of my friends in the group hate writing dialogue. They can walk into a room and describe the furniture and the light. They can do it with their closed. It's so easy for them. And I find that so difficult, torturous. I hate describing furniture [Laughs] ... a physical setting; I find it so laborious. It was not a gift I was given. But dialogue is one.

I do notice I'm very chatty as a person ... My husband is like, "Are you still on the phone?" I chat away to people. I think somehow, thankfully, that's been put to good use in the book. If you just give me a couple of characters sitting around chatting, I am so happy. That's like my heaven to write. Just let them chitchat along for as many pages as they want. [Laughs]

Rachel Schwartzmann: Well, I love first of all, that you still sit on the phone and talk. I feel like that's an art that's been lost in the digital age.

Coco Mellors: Oh yeah. I have to say that I think might be a sober thing ... Because sober people we're always calling each other, checking in, asking how you're doing. It's so much part of sobriety: phone check-ins. But I agree. It freaks people out when I call them. I'll call them, they won't answer, and they'll text me, being like, "Is everything OK?" I'm like, "I'm just calling to see how you are. Answer your phone!" [Laughs]

Rachel Schwartzmann: I mean, I would much prefer a phone call versus a text. But it's nice.

You know, I think dialogue can be a place or an environment. It can ground you in a setting just as much as describing a lamp or a couch. And I think that's what made Cleopatra and Frankenstein so palpable. And in terms of what's unspoken, this is something I noticed in your book, but it's also something I've maybe become more attuned to as a reader. And I asked a version of this question to Katie Kitamura, who wrote Intimacies, and I'd like to pose it to you as well: I asked her in what ways is writing about grief the same as writing about power. But instead of power, I'd love to swap that out for love. So, in what ways is writing about grief the same as writing about love?

Coco Mellors: I love that question. You know, my mother is a therapist, and she's a grief counselor; it's bereavement counseling. She works with people who have recently lost someone close to them. I think she had said to me that "grief is love without a place to go." So it's a kind of arrow without a target, or it's a kind of energy that's circling the body and hasn't got a place to sort of release. And I thought that was so beautiful—that grief is love. They're the same thing. And what's so painful is that feeling of having this love to give and not having either the person or the place or whatever it is to give it to. That's why I think grief can come in so many forms. It can be a loss of someone or something you had and a loss of something you want. That's not coming. My sister is recently divorced, and she was saying, "I feel like I have so much love to give and no one to give it to. I want to give it to someone." And I thought, yeah, that's not necessarily grief for the last person she was giving it to; it's this yearning for the new person: a child, a friend, a partner.

So I think this book is full of love. This book is all about many different forms of love: platonic, romantic, familial. And for every single one of those forms of love, there's a form of grief, loss, and disappointment—because to love is to sort of feel disappointed sometimes. Because these are fallible and failing humans, and these characters perhaps more so than more than average, I would say. They're truly some troubled, troubled people and deeply yearning—all of them—for connection and love. Yet they yearn for it, but they don't know how to get it. And the things that they do actually take them further away from it often. So they're all grieving, and they're all sort of lovestruck at the same time.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It comes across sentence by sentence. And as we talk more about the story and these characters, maybe we can pause and have you read a passage that introduces this community of people.

Coco Mellors: Yes, I'd love to. So I'm going to read a passage that happens at the sort of end of their wedding day, and Cleo is remembering how they decided to get married—so we go into a memory.


Rachel Schwartzmann: I have chills hearing it out loud. It's definitely a very powerful tone that's set for the rest of the book.

All throughout, we get a sense of the different struggles or dynamics that add texture to Cleo and Frank's story. But something that was surprising to me was your exploration of faith: from Santiago in the chapel at LAX [Airport] to Eleanor with the rabbi. There's one exchange with Eleanor that was really resonant. You wrote that "two of my favorite prayers are 'help me' and 'thank you.' And Eleanor asks, "Those are prayers?" And [the rabbi] responds, "Those are excellent prayers." He smiles and begins to retreat. Then, he turns back to me one more time and asks, "You want to know one of my personal favorite prayers?" "What?" "Wow."

That stayed with me because it is such a potent reminder that faith can also equate to gratitude in a lot of ways. And you talked a little bit about this earlier—regarding the responsibilities of distilling perspectives that are different than your own—but you know, what is your relationship to faith? Do you believe there's a difference between being grateful versus faithful?

Coco Mellors: Wow, I've never been asked this before, and it's funny that you do ask it because I've noticed in my second book a lot of talk of God coming out and not believing in God and wishing to believe in something. And I definitely think a lot of the seeds for that were planted in this novel.

I wrote this book from when I was twenty-five to when I was thirty, and I stopped drinking when I was twenty-six—so about a year and a half into writing the novel, I realized that I was really hurting myself. I was doing some pretty serious damage through my own addiction. And part of getting sober is ... people talk about a lot is a belief in a higher power, in a higher self. You can call it God. God can stand for good, orderly direction, great outdoors, group of drunks—it can be anything you want it to be. It just has to be something larger than you. And when I sort of stopped drinking and started having those conversations, I had never in my life thought about religion or faith. I had not been raised religiously. I grew up in England, which is a very nonreligious country now. It's different to America. Like, no one asks if the Prime Minister is Catholic or Protestant, you know? Nobody cares. I grew up in the Church of England, I guess, [that] would technically be the faith at my school, which barely registered as a religion to me at that time. So, I never thought about the afterlife. I had never thought about spirituality.

Then I got sober, and I started thinking ... someone said to me, "When you drink, when you take drugs, whatever the thing could be—gamble, have sex with strangers—it's a low-level search all the time for a God." And I thought, "Oh my God, like, is that what I was looking for?" I do not mean God in the Judeo-Christian sense at all. I mean, God, as in standing for anything you want it to mean, that is something loving and greater than yourself.

I realized that I had been searching, searching, searching for something to believe in that wasn't me and wasn't manmade—that wasn't of the city, wasn't of New York even—it was bigger than New York—and I gave that search to my characters. I let them look as well, and they found different things to me. But those three prayers—thank you, help me, and wow—are three prayers that I was taught. I think they are some of the most beautiful prayers in the entire world. "Wow," as a prayer? I loved that idea. It was so different than what I thought, growing up with maybe the Lord's Prayer as the only prayer I'd ever heard. And I realized that my characters, too, were looking. They were looking for connection. They were looking for something to believe in that was bigger than the life they had in New York. So, I think it's so cool that you picked up on that. And it's in my second book, too. And I recently read Jonathan Franzen's Crossroads, and he has a lot of that searching in his book as well. I found it wonderful to read and to see another author looking at sort of the same issues.

Rachel Schwartzmann: It really took my breath away just because so much of the dialogue wasn't necessarily light, but there was this sort of wit and bravado. Reading Eleanor's sections in particular—it's funny that you say that it's something that's bigger. At the same time, her mother, I forget where in the book this is, but she equates love to being a grounding force. And that's sort of what I felt when reading those prayers. It almost seemed like that was a moment where each character got to return to their body, in a way, versus searching. That was just my take.

Coco Mellors: Yeah. I think that's so true. It's almost like it's something bigger and something smaller. It's something so small that you're able to come back to exactly where your feet are in that moment.

Rachel Schwartzmann: I think in order to recognize those things, it is an act of slowing down, which might be a nice way to kind of shift the conversation to your process a little bit. Because I'm curious as you tackled some of these things, what your relationship with pace was like? Especially in our digital age, where there are a ton of distractions, and the way that we've told stories has changed pretty profoundly.

Coco Mellors: Oh yeah. This is very relevant to my experience of writing this book, which, you know, I started when I was twenty-five; it came out when I was thirty-two. So that's a big chunk of my life to spend on one project. And I really remember this feeling of being in my twenties—and I would go to the library on weekends often or at night—and feeling like I was really out of sync with the pace of the world. I was watching a lot of my friends have their careers kind of takeoff and make these projects that took less time and [that] was giving them, rightly so, worldly esteem. And I thought, "God, here I am, still sitting in a library, writing things that nobody reads, working on a project that's not going to come out—I don't even know if it's ever going to get published, let alone, when—just feeling like: Am I just being so silly? Should I be writing short stuff that I can put on Instagram and then get a following? And should I be writing for magazines? But I liked this process of being in a book. I like books! [Laughs] So, I many times felt doubtful and worried that I was doing something that was long in a time that values fast. And it was hard to stay the course sometimes and not feel like: Am I being foolish? Am I giving so much time to something that's a waste?

I had to return to: even if I never got an agent, [or] I never published the book, I loved doing it. And how you want to spend your life, how you want to spend your time—not for any product or for any, I don't know, fanfare at the end—but in the actual moment you're in, that was what I wanted to do with my time. I wanted to sit in a quiet library—I worked out of the NYU library, you can see the whole city—and live with character and story. And that's how I want to spend my life, regardless of anything that happens as a result of it. It doesn't need a result. The thing is the thing. [Laughs] The time spent writing is what matters. It felt almost rebellious to live that way, to not be able to say, "Oh, I have this agent and this many followers, and this person's waiting for my book." No one was waiting for the book. It was just me. It was just me and how I wanted to spend my days and my nights.

Now with my second book, which has a little bit quicker, partly I think, cause I learned how to write a book with my first book, and I've used some of those skills, I try to resist the kind of industrialization of creativity. Even the term workshop is an industrial term: cut down, clean up. You know, that kind of language around creating, unconsciously it seeps in, and this feeling of like, "I'm going to produce a book every two years from now on so that I stay relevant." It's certainly, with different forms of literature work—very commercial literature that is kind of the pattern. But literary fiction, one of the reasons I love it is [because] there's none of that. Like you can produce a book every ten years, like Donna Tartt, and you're still considered to be one of the most seminal and important writers, you know? I think that's so fantastic and so different from so many other industries. So I thought, I'll finish my second book. I felt a bit of that kinda factory farm, like, "I gotta rush it out so that people remember who I am," and I really pushed back against that internally, I think. The book is going to be finished when it's ready to be finished.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Those are all things I'm actually unlearning because, for my entire twenties, I only operated with the product and the validation in mind. And it's been a really hard look-in-the-mirror moment the last few years. But things like Slow Stories and getting back to my original goal—my original plan was to be a writer, and it sort of got diluted into other forms of storytelling. A lot of people are kind of reckoning with those notions that aren't really rooted in this reality anymore. I mean, the last couple of years, especially, I think we've really all had to recalibrate.

Coco Mellors: Yeah. I think, especially with social media, this feeling of a built-in audience: if you create something and no one sees it, does it count? Yes. Absolutely. Because you lived it. It's your life. I heard the poet Eileen Myles say something that really moved me. They were saying, "Oh, here I am, I'm all alone." And then suddenly, they caught themselves and said, "I'm not alone. I'm here. I am with me." And I thought, wow! The lived experience of your life, unseen by anyone else—because no one else knows what we think, no one knows our internal world—that is the only thing we have that really matters because it's the only thing we ever actually experience. So I felt like if I was writing a novel just to get published, which is like five percent of the life of a writer versus the ninety-five percent, which is being with words, I was living my life completely backward.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you feel you were on the right track?

Coco Mellors: I felt with my book … it's interesting writing a first novel … and no one was paying me to write it, and no one was asking me to write [it]. It was my choice. So I felt that given that is the fact, then I have to enjoy the experience of writing it—because that's all I have, is the experience. At the time, there was no paycheck for the hours I spent on it, and there was no audience really, you know, so I felt all I had was the thing itself. And so I was like, I really want to write a book that I'm going to enjoy writing. So that meant a lot of dialogue for me, that meant characters that made me laugh, that meant experiences of them doing things that I felt were totally outrageous because it made it more enjoyable for me.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Absolutely. I mean, I can't wait to read your second book. I'll be awaiting details on that! But generally, as you continue to ruminate on some of these ideas and practices, whether online or offline, I'm curious if there's a question that you hope people start asking you more often. It can be in the context of creativity, love, wellbeing, the writing life, but I'd love to hear what's on your mind.

Coco Mellors: Oh, this is interesting. One, I love the questions that you've been asking me. I really do because they're different from a lot of the ones I get. They've really made me think, which I really like.

I feel like I talk about a lot of what I want to talk about when I talk about this book because so many of my interests and my values are in the book. Sometimes, I feel startled by the judgments towards these characters, both positive and negative. And one of the reasons that I read is not to have a sort of moral judgment of what people do, but just to have the kind of curiosity about human nature: Why? Why do they do what they do? I've really enjoyed hearing from readers and talking to readers who have that kind of spirit when they read. They just want to know more about humans that aren't themselves. I love talking about that. That's what I love writing about. So, I don't really write from a place of thinking about themes or having a message to readers. I never really think about that. It all starts with curiosity and just interesting people. People that I want to spend more time with that I want to know more about. So I think that's what I'm interested in in life.

I noticed that when I was younger, I tried to write about the things I thought I should write about [or] that I thought would make me impressive. But I found that the best things to write about are the things you like to talk about. So, if you pay attention to what you are chatting about, those are probably good things to write. And I was just chatting—not in a gossipy way, I hope—but I would just chat about people. I would chat on the phone to my friend about whether or not she should stay in her relationship or how she felt about her mother coming to visit. [Laughs] That was what I talked about. So I thought that's probably what I should write about.

Rachel Schwartzmann: Do you read your work after?

Coco Mellors: I do. It was nice to read aloud the part you asked me to read because I've never read that section aloud before.

I read it sometimes to pick what I'm going to read at readings. I read something… someone was talking about a fight scene that's in this book when Cleo and Frank go upstate and how they had felt that it really touched on something that had happened in their own life. And they were very moved by it, which I was happy about. I kind of had forgotten. I was like, "What did they say to each other?" So I went back and reread that yesterday, actually, so I could kind of understand that reader a little better. I was like, "Oh, what is it that she was picking up on that?" Then I read it and was like, "OK. I see."

Rachel Schwartzmann: Yeah. Oh, I mean, I think there's so much more that we could probably speak about just in terms of Cleo and Frank and all of the wonderful themes that have surfaced in this conversation. But I think to close things out, I'd actually love to have you read one more passage from the book.

Coco Mellors: Yes. So this is their honeymoon. Cleo and Frank are in the South of France. And they've had a fight, and Cleo has disappeared with one of the servers from the hotel. She's driven on the back of his moped to a party in the town. She's gotten pretty drunk, and she's decided she needs to go back to the hotel where Frank is. So she just asked the young server if he would drive her back. And he has said no; he's a little annoyed that she's leaving and that she has rebuffed his romantic advances. So that's what's just happened.



Rachel Schwartzmann: That was Coco Mellors, author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein. You can purchase Cleopatra and Frankenstein anywhere books are sold—though we recommend supporting local and independent bookstores if you can. You can also follow Coco on social @cocomellors. Stay tuned, as we’ll be sharing highlights from this episode on our own channels @slowstoriesofficial on Instagram and @slowstoriespod on Twitter. I’m Rachel Schwartzmann, and you’ve been listening to Slow Stories. Thank you so much for tuning in.