Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club - Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors with Taj Atwal

Episode Date: December 19, 2024

This week's book guest is Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors.Sara and Cariad are joined by BAFTA nominee and Hullraisers star, actor Taj Atwal - to discuss Percy the Park Keeper, boxing, childbirth, addiction, posh English people and the Spice Girls.Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Trigger warning: In this episode we discuss grief, death and addiction. Blue Sisters is available to buy here.You can find Taj on Instagram @tajatwal1Cariad’s children's book The Christmas Wish-tastrophe is available to buy now.Sara’s debut novel Weirdo is published by Faber & Faber and is available to buy here.Cariad’s book You Are Not Alone is published by Bloomsbury and is available to buy here.Tickets for Sara's tour show I Am A Strange Gloop are available to buy from sarapascoe.co.ukFollow Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclub Recorded and edited by Aniya Das for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm Sarah Pasco. Hello, I'm Carriad Lloyd. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read too much. We talk too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why we've created the Weirdo's Book Club.

Join us. A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted and appreciated. A place for the person who'd love to be in a real book club, but doesn't like wine or nibbles. Or being around other people. Is that you? Join us. Check out our Instagram at Sarah and Carriads Weirdo's Book Club for the upcoming books. to be discussing. You can read along and share your opinions. Or just skulk around in your raincoat like the weirdo you are. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you.

This week's book guest is Blue Sisters by Cocoa Mellas. What's it about? A year on from losing their beloved sibling, three sisters attempt to navigate their grief. What qualifies it for the Weirdo's Book Club? Well, it's not a female retelling of the Blues Brothers. Sadly. In this episode we discuss Percy the Parkkeeper. Boxing. Childbirth. Addiction. Posh English people. and the Spice Girls. And joining us this week is Taj Atwell. Taj is a BAFTA-nominated actress who has appeared in so many things, including Stella, Line of Duty and, of course, the incredible hull-raises.

Trigger warning, in this episode we do discuss grief, death and addiction. Welcome to the show, Taj. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Are you a big reader? Tartre's really big reader. This is where we bonded. We did.

With our backs to each other in a makeup room. Have you always been into reading? Yes, I have actually. Even, I think the earliest books I remember, The Nick Butterworth books. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Percy the Park Keeper. Yeah, yeah.

The Kipper series. So what kind of thing was Percy up to? Mate. Actually, if you reread them. Keep in the park? Well, quite strange relationships. A lot of the animals. They're all sleeping in his bed.

Okay, that is slightly strange. It's snow, it's cold outside. Yes. But it's just that edge of like they all get in the bed. Also, there's that singer who's got like 11 pets in her bed. Who's that? Well, that's the question. What is her name?

You will know, you'll have heard of her. 11 pets in her bed. In her bed. I know that because Mike's boyfriend was in love with her but didn't want to actually meet her and get together with her. Okay, I need to Google. I need to go and get tested. No, what you need to do is talk about this book.

Well, yes, but just before, because we are going to talk about Blue Sisters. By Cochamelas. Which is not, actually, let's just talk about it, parody on the Blues Brothers. That didn't even cross my mind. Well, I thought that's what it was. Wow.

Okay. Why did you call it the Blues Brothers? There's no S on Blues. There's just Blue. It took me a long time. time, you know, they don't really, because their sisters with a surname blue, and it doesn't say it for a while. And I thought, oh, I've never known anyone with a surname blue. That really through, you know, and you're like, oh, it's blue. I thought it was like, blue sisters.

Yeah, well, I think it's, you know, sad with blue. I know, sad with blue. And that's a surname's, well, let's just, that's just one of the ridiculous things about this book. Let's just pop a peg in it. Sarah did not like this book. But that's the thing with books, like with songs, like with films, what someone really loves and thinks, that's the best thing I've, you know, imbibed all year. Someone else just goes, yeah, not for me, couldn't enjoy it. just couldn't lose myself. So it's not that I think this is a bad book. Clarion and I had read Kokomella's first book.

Yeah, have you read Cleopatra and Frankenstein? I've heard of it. It looks very similar, painted cover, and it came out in 2020. Debuttal. Really readable. It's making it a TV series, right? Making it into a film, I think. I think it's gone to Warner Brothers as a film.

Yeah. And it's a young person falling in love in New York, and it feels very much like a writer of writing about what they know. So we thought this would be a great follow-up. Yeah, I loved Cleopatra and Franks, I really enjoyed it. And obviously, Cocoa Mellas can write. What I would say, at my actual summaries,

I think she's reaching in this book to things she can't write about. It's not about the Blues Brothers. It's called Blue Sisters. It is about four sisters, Avery, Bonnie and Lucky, and Nikki, who this isn't a spoiler. We've learned very quickly from the beginning that Nikki has died. Of endometriosis. Not of endometriosis.

It's kind of, first of all, it tells you that's what she's died of. Okay, well, she's dead. That's a very grey area I discovered in the book. Yeah, yeah. So one sister is dead, they're four sisters. They've grown up in New York with a British mother and an American father who's alcoholic, and they have only really had each other. They've all sort of gone off into different angles.

It's been very stressful. So Lucky is a model, hard party model. They all have very extreme life styles. Avery is a lawyer living in London. We start the book a year after Nikki has died and we're really seeing everyone falling apart. And then it sort of goes, it follows their journey of falling apart and eventually kind of reaching some kind of conclusion to the grief that they're carrying. So that's what the book is about.

I think it's because so much of it talks about grief. And there was so much of it that I felt seen with because I lost one of the closest friends I've ever had in June. Oh, I'm so sorry. There was observations that she made about grief that I had not. They kind of have, my grief is worse. My grief is worse. How dare you grieve her in this way?

I want to grieve in her that way. And I felt like with a lot of people. Oh, the sister, and she's like, it's my, she was my sister. You're not the only person who's grieving her wife's sister. Yeah, and you feel like, even when they went to the funeral and their, how dare they overtly show their grief in that way? Our grief is worse. And I felt those conflicting emotions with everyone that knew her and rage at people for how they were showing their grief at her, which everyone was allowed to show their grief in their own way. But I felt rage over it.

How dare you show it in that way? So they call it the hierarchy of grief. that's what it's literally called that people believe there's a hierarchy and it's not true like everyone if you grieve you grieve that's it and the only hierarchy that wins the only person who has any trump card

is the loss of a child because that's against the natural order of things but it's very common for people to feel very angry and there's this idea when someone dies there's a circle of friends around them and are you in the velvet rope

or are you behind the velvet rope and people don't always know everyone's relationships so to someone else you might, you know, they might be like, oh, they weren't, they weren't even speaking. They weren't friends. But you know, no, no, we knew each other. We had this understanding that you didn't. But that's the thing with grief.

It's entirely your relationship with that person. Like that's what the relationship was. You plus them made a relationship. And now that's gone. You're missing that piece. But only you understood what it was like with the two of you alone. So it's a very isolating feeling. And when you see other people grieving, you're just, we're all just angry.

They're not here. That's all the angriaries. as furious people can die. That's what the fury comes from. Cocomela's at the beginning of her book makes this description. This is in her prologue. Yeah. So she's saying this like it's fact. A sister is not a friend, she says, matter of factly. Who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable and as banal as a friend? True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb were pushed screaming through identical birth canals. It's not the same

as friendship. You don't choose each other and there is no furtive period of getting to know the other. You're part of each other right from the start. Look at the umbilical cord. Tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential. Compare it to a friendship bracelet, a brightly woven spread. That is the difference between sister and a friend. That enraged me. Right, okay, so, yeah, let's talk about that.

Touch, have you, what siblings have you got? I have a brother who's only 18 months older and a sister who's 12 and a half, 13 years younger. Okay. But we're all extremely close, and we have a WhatsApp group, we talk all the time, and it's so close, so sometimes this weird thing, that's happened a few times.

If I've not spoken a few weeks and someone's injured their knee or, say, for example, my brother did or a stomach ache or whatever, guaranteed I felt a pain in that area. And I've not known. I've just been feeling that and then I'll speak to them. And I've had the exact same for last week, same last week. Same pain. But that page did really, and I thought, oh, is this what the best of the book's going to be like? Because I have friends who feel so much like family. Yeah. And you have two sisters.

But also I just, so with a relationship as broad, the spectrum, I think it's bad writing. I think it minimizes things because you can tell me anything about your characters. And if it's true for those characters, I'll believe you, you can't tell me it's true about the entire world. And this is where I think Cochamelas experience of a novelist, she's had this huge novel, and then she wrote another one about some really massive stuff. And it's not that I think she was unsuccessful all the time.

I think occasionally I would read it going, is that what you mean? You're saying this really huge thing. Do you really mean that? In the third page, she talks about a character flipping over onto her hands at 10 years old. I'm like, do you mean that? Do you mean they did a backflip? Yeah.

Because you're telling me they're like, that's not a thing that just happens. She kept wanting to make these characters extraordinary, which meant I kept losing this believability of them. They could have just been normal people with normal jobs, normal addiction, normal suffering. And she told me this lucky, the model looked like a husky. So there was a dog in it the whole time.

I mean, yeah, she is called Lucky Blue, which there was some of the time I thought, I mean, that is, wow. I wanted to edit it. I wanted to say to her, have another go at that. I know you're trying to say something very meaningful, but you actually haven't encapsulated it there. Telling everyone what it's like to have a sister, it's like, you may be careful because a lot of the world has sisters. Well, I don't. She's wonderful. Do you know what I felt with that first page?

I felt judged because I felt like if you didn't have that bond. I don't have sisters. I was like, oh. Then, you know, you'd feel like, oh, well, yeah, we grew nettles in the same room, but you don't, you know, you don't have to like your family. Well, also, I felt a bit uncomfortable with that because there's lots of people who are in the same family who did not grow in the same womb. Like, I felt a bit like it's quite an interesting thing to say.

Yeah, and what is growing up together? Because actually, for most people, I would say, is it the birth canal? Or is it the fact that you lived in the same house as someone? Yeah. I mean, to be fair, it's one sentence in the prologue. And it's definitely setting the tone of the book. I think what she's trying to do is set the tone of these sisters. feel like this.

But I think what it missed was, she should have said the Blue Sisters felt like they were more than just friends. They were connected because of the womb. Like the Blue Sisters felt that. Whereas it felt like everybody had to feel like that.

When you don't enjoy a book, all that happens is you said like things keep clanging to you. Yeah. Well, they cling me out. I kept trying to go back in because I knew we were going to talk about it. I wanted to understand what's going on.

As a writer, I wanted to understand it because I think it's much more interesting to think why is this person sort of slipping up here. Yeah, there were definitely, And there was lots of moments where I was reading it, I kept noticing things where I was like, oh, that's a bit weird that she's training to box at 14.

Okay, fine. A bit weird that the, like, the mum and dad, I know he's an alcoholic, but we're like, where is the mother in this situation? But then it, you know, and it just doesn't bother you so much? So you just carry on reading, you're like, oh, okay. So it bothered me because to tell me the children are this affected by a childhood and then not give me any real examples of why.

Well, also, I, well, they sort of, the China was smashed and, like, the Christmas tree. So late us told him the book. I actually think the main problem was we didn't get enough of the parents. Like she separated them so much from the mum and dad. But the mum and dad are the problem. They like this alcoholic father who was happy, the addiction has taken over his life. And I read an interview with her saying like, oh, I wanted to talk about not the parents, like how siblings form you. I said, but you can't separate siblings from parents.

Well, your siblings don't. Well, I mean, I don't know. But they do a bit, but also parents are. But your parents. Yeah. And your parents form. you and then your dynamics formed from that with your siblings. But I wanted to ask you, when you were reading it,

did you feel like you knew enough about their early childhood? Did you feel like you could just... It just didn't bother me. Like the first chunk of the book was a bit of a strug to get through. It was just like when we get into the story where I can't wait to read the rest. And it really only started to kick off when Avery was with her partner. And that's when I felt like she was describing the minutiae of the simplicity of relationships where I felt like it started to come alive.

And her style of writing started to come alive. I agree with you that the extremes of everything I didn't feel like were grounded in anything I didn't understand. Yeah, you can have those traits regardless. You could even have a fantastic or bring in stuff. It's like, so they couldn't just live in London. They had to live in Hampstead

and it had to be this thing where she had so much money she could pay for a flat in New York. I know. I know. She could have just have been an addiction. She had to be a heroin addict living in a car park. I know. And then stop it like cold turkey.

With the boxing, I thought the boxing was extreme. She couldn't just be someone who would. was fit and she had to be the top of all boxes and then quit boxing. I think it did is it doesn't make you believe their sisters. That's what I found because of the extremity. I thought Avery interesting character, Bonnie interesting character, lucky interesting character. Those three stories. I almost wanted a book of Avery, a book of Lucky Book of Bonnie. But when I tried to bring those three people in a family, I was like, that's not, I mean, not that you have to have the same job as your sibling, but like, normally you sort of feel like, oh, you're both talkative or you're

both this or you're both, you can see you went to normal office jobs. I'm like, I'm I just was like, how did that family produce a model, a heroin recovered, addicted lawyer, and the boxer was mad. It came from nowhere. But also, I think it's a, this is my opinion, and you two might disagree, but the boxing stuff, which was really, really well described, it's really interesting. She's done her research on boxing. No, she's boxing.

So she's taken something from her life that she knows so well to write about. But then it means that when you're writing about something you don't know, for instance, being a lesbian heroin addict, the writing is weak. Or the writing's thin. I found the box and stuff actually the derrious bit to read. That was the bit that was like, oh, I can't be bothered to read about Bonnie. Yeah. I don't know why I felt so disassociated from her.

So Bonnie, again, not really a spoiler. She has a much older trainer who's trained, Pavel, Russian trainer, who's trained since she was 15 and Bonnie is basically in love with him. And I didn't feel, again, because she's telling these three massive stories and Nikki's story, the sister who's dead, I don't really feel like I knew Pavel. I didn't really feel like what it meant to her. So when it was like, when she did reveal anything, I was like, oh right okay and that's how even though I enjoyed the book like a lot of it I was like

oh well then what happens like I did keep thinking oh I'm wondering well I'm gonna and then and then what like what's the thing we're building to I think it's her personality traits but with Avery I felt like there was so much of her past personality in the book and I really kind of resonated with a lot of that constant need to just fix and mend and be there for everyone and constantly being that felt like her identity and when she couldn't be that I really resonated when she didn't know who she was then because that was so much of who she was growing up. But weirdly, the whole book I read everyone in an English accent, I don't hear that. That happened to me every time when someone would meet Avery and they'd be like, oh, you're American,

I'd go, oh. She's in, she didn't see American. They didn't feel American to me. Cocoa Mellas grew up in London, all moved to New York at 15. So, which I think in Cleopatra and Frankenstein, she does brilliantly. Like, it's set in New York and London, the character, like, you really get that feeling of someone who understands both cities very, very well. Whereas slightly here, I guess we only dealt with New York fully and then Hampstead.

So it was like a very strange place to like hang out because Hampstead is a, like a neat, you know, in like not everyone lives in a tiny village or a beautiful house. Like that's a very specific type of Londoner that lives there. Which she does acknowledge in the book that it's like it's the London that Americans love because it's what they imagine it to look like. I didn't really... I didn't see it in my head again. I couldn't see it in my head.

What about the clubbing scenes, like the music, the drugs, that kind of side of thing? With who, Lucky. Lucky is a model who's having a sort of breakdown, really, but it ends in like realizing her drug addiction, her alcohol addiction. She's young and she's quite isolated. And she's pushing it to the extreme. What's the one of not? It's not breakdown.

What do you call it when you like blow out is all I've got left? Well, she's self-destruction. She's just on the path of self-destruction. When you like take everything and go mad, there's a better word for it. Anyway, yeah. Weekend. Yeah, just a casual friend. Sarah's that, yeah.

Oh, yeah. I think she writes about addiction really well. Yes, really well. And I think she writes about addicts really well. She is former addict and she's been going to meetings for eight years. I read a big piece about that. And I think she writes about addicts and their relationship and the lies. So I didn't know that.

But they were the bits of the book that felt the most authentic. Yeah, yeah. I loved, I really loved the scene with the posh English people and the sort of taking drugs preloading with child job before they go out to a club. I just thought it was so. well observed and so funny and actually that's the richness that is much more in Cleopatra. That's what she can write where the world feels really real even though they're crazy characters.

I think that was the page that I folded it because I thought the way she described sniff of coke, bump of care, get a drink, have a smoke if you coke, coke, keep bumpy okay and then her descending into being absolutely paralytic. I folded it because I thought she must have done this herself to have described it so well. But it made me really anxious because

I felt anxious because I'm so anxious. Because you've got this character and she was off her face. And so you're this hidden observer to someone who's in a nightclub not wearing a top with friends she doesn't know, taking everything that's given to her, in and out of toilets, you know, kissing people. So the fact that she was going to get a taxi home, the fact that she was going to be a fun, all of it, all of it. How is she going to get home? How is she going to be okay? What is going to happen to her?

That was so well constructed. Oh, it was brilliant. Yeah, I felt that bubble of like anxiety because I felt like I was there and I was like, oh, and I felt, oh, you're taking too much. She'd take it too much. She's back. She's back. Oh, now you're going to clap. You've clapped.

Now you're back or just something. And I really, even when she was in the bathroom, she saw all the mirrored versions of, of, um, Drol who she was hugging. And I felt, oh, I could just feel that. And then the flip of it, when she's at home, she's sort of on a doorstep, crumbled up. It felt very real.

An elder sister's reaction to finding a sibling, you know, someone who you cannot stop someone self-destructing. You cannot help them if they want to hurt themselves. And yet you're the person who's going to, you know, The scene was her sort of trying to sober her up in the bars going, not you as well, not you as well. That was all really effective. Yeah, I thought it was really effective.

And I thought also I loved the phone call with Avery after she'd dealt with Lucky's meltdown. And she rings Bonnie and you see the vulnerability of Avery being like, I thought she was gone. Like I didn't know what to say. And that sort of truthful family exchange of like you're shouting at someone being like, you need to talk your life. And you're going, oh my God, I'm so worried about her.

Like I'm so worried. But not saying to someone, I'm just so worried. worried about and I love you that's what this is coming from. And also what happens with sisters is being you know you have to tell the other sister because that's the point. Well I wouldn't know Sarah being not blessed with the perfect person to share a womb with. Only having a brother, we have claimed the same canal but it is not the same. Do tell me what it's like. I mean that's the thing is is she saying it's just the most amazing relationship. I think she thinks so. Or she's just saying it's permanent. It's tough. I feel like she's saying it's the permanence of something. Yeah. You're always

going to have been born and that's created in a relationship. I think she thinks so. I think she's just saying it's created in that same space. I did just feel a slightly judge of, and then you have to love that person. Unconditionally and wholeheartedly. And as everybody knows, like, sometimes you just, you know. And also, siblings can be simple, and siblings can be simple and separate.

And there's no reason in talking about sisters to go and friendships are banal and much less. Well, I just think she should have said that's how the Blue Sisters felt. Because it's clear that they love, they're very connected, they've grown up as a four, every mothered them. because their mother was not there for some reason,

which has never really dealt with. It really isn't dealt with. No, I thought a lot of the parents was really... So that's my problem. Like a massive gap. If you're going to tell me that the parent is so bad that it's their fault, which the book does. It says it's the childhood's fault that this is happening to the adults.

Then not to explain that. And then we do meet the mother towards the end. And it's just so much is heaped at her door in terms of blame. She's called the C word by the daughters, you know. I think what I miss with the mother and father. One, we never... We never fucking hear from the father, which I found frustrating. I think we missed the nuance.

But also of the relationship between a child and a parent. I think she got very good with nuance of sisters, but the nuance of, like, I don't think they just blame the childhood. I think she's talking about addiction and inherited addiction. But I think when Avery does go to see her, I felt like, as someone who has kids, I felt like we needed the nuance of like, hey, you know, what's hard having fucking kids?

And she sometimes, I still felt like that kind of petulance, was always there if like, you were a bad mum, not. And at one point someone says, you know, they did their best. But I was like, there's no understanding of a woman with four kids and an alcoholic husband. I think, well, my issue, and this is a personal issue, it's not an issue against the writing, is she kept telling me memories, which I thought were incredible, as in, they've got the swimming pool, they're in a house on holiday in France. And the parents are just absent, because they're not in France or wherever it is. Upstate, absolutely. Anyway, they're on the same.

But it's sounding like France. That's why I checked. And there's this one where are they? There's this one where she slagging her mum off that they're all going to see the spice girls by themselves and they get his spice girl t-shirts and their mum could be bothered to buy a fifth ticket. It's like, do you know how much spice girls tickets are?

What childhood are you talking about? Because you're trying to show me a story about neglect where someone bought you merch and you went to see the spice girls. So she kept using examples of such privilege while saying, and how terrible was it that their mum didn't want to go with them. And you have Bonnie coming to the realisation

that her sisters are very, very selfish. I thought it was a really good moment when Bonnie's like, oh, my fuck, my sisters are actually assholes. I love them, but they're assholes. And I felt like lucky and Avery, we kind of needed them to kind of go, oh, I am privileged. I'm not privileged because I have an addiction and this is terrible and I need to do it. But actually, a lot of my life has been, has been love.

Which is so funny because actually most of the book is talking about how it was trying to convey that they weren't privileged and that they all lived in this tiny two-bed place in New York and then Carter, Beaumont, friends were the privileged ones and looked down on them. for not bringing gifts and she gave the Spice Girls T-shirt and whatever. And actually, that's such a brilliant observation about privilege. I didn't even, you know, probably subconsciously was taking that on board.

And reading them in quite a privilege, right. Which is why I've read them in this really well-spoken. Yeah, they seemed posh, didn't they? Posh English, yeah, yeah. And the mum seemed very posh English. That was very believable to me. And so they sort of came across as posh English girls. Even, like, lucky being in Hamps of these people,

I could sort of hear her, like you said, like her posh English, she's just one of those, like, really tall, rich girls. that has unbelievable, beautiful face and great hair. She did talk about great observation, how really don't talk about class, and they don't acknowledge that. And then I saw the difference between the levels of privilege

and how vast it can be and how you could kind of be here. But I never saw them as kind of impoverished. No, not at all. Can I ask you a question about how you felt about Bonnie assaulting the man? I mean, how did, well, I mean, I love it. I don't know. It seemed like a very natural thing for an Xboxer to do. Yeah.

And I thought her reaction was quite extreme. But I think she was trying to make it like, oh, she's a grieving reaction. Like she's kicked the shit out of someone. She shouldn't have, she had no control. Yes. So I didn't particularly, I was like, okay. Yeah. I was just like, okay, sure, what next?

Yes. What next? Yeah. I felt her reaction was justified. She really thought she had killed him. And I could imagine that being a shock. And then, you know, I could imagine her the fear of the repercussions of him wanting to come back and the move to New York. What did you feel?

Yeah. Oh, it was more that there was just no ramifications. Oh, I see. He's just on away. It's a huge thing to do in a book. Beat someone to a point where they could have, you know, and, you know, the eggshell skull rule, if you do kill someone from one punch, et cetera, et cetera,

if he'd hit the floor in a different way, blah, blah, blah. And then it just goes away for her. But that's what I mean, like you don't quite, things happen, like her life in LA that she lives there for a year, but we don't quite. Yeah. And then Pety turns up and you're like, oh, okay. And the other one was the love story with Paville because,

and so I guess asking you both again, because if you work with someone for a very, very, very long time. I didn't believe their relationship at all. That was my question. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't. In what way? Well, I just thought he's been training her since she was 15

and now she's like 30. And he's 45. He's 45 and so now the age gap is fine. Yeah, 30 or something. But she suddenly sort of realized she loves him. And I just thought, well, everything she described was like he's been a father to me. I didn't have a father.

So it's showing like this tactile. I think that was my thing. If someone touches you all the time in that way, where would the sparks come? But also, she said they never really speak. They don't really know what goes on. She has no idea what goes on in his head. But she has decided she thinks it would be really lovely to kiss him. And I thought, I don't really think you know this much.

He has this wife who's amazing. But so again, Her Gamalas just gets rid of her. Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, okay. I didn't have any, like, when they got together, I wasn't like, woohoo. I was like, okay, now what? Sure. I got the slow burn.

Like I felt like she did touch upon it being a slow burn for him And maybe you know as feelings changed as she got slightly older And lent into it more I don't think it was a big, I don't think she was trying to say It was like a big spark It was like this slow and gradual buildup of something But never she never acknowledged it Which then I think meant we as an audience

Maybe didn't quite acknowledge it either I think she definitely wanted to make him a really good man Who's known sons since there were 15 He has to wait a really bloody long time For them to be really grown up So that they're attracted to the woman of them not the teenager. Maybe we needed to see his side of that.

Yeah. The flip side of it or something from him to say when that changed for him or when there was something. Even when they had that conversation, I was like, he was just like, no, we shouldn't. Close your eyes.

And I thought, oh, I could have done with a bit more of like, oh, you know, Bonnie. Yeah, to know when the shift has been from here has you liked it for ages. Like, Bonnie, I know you and you 15, this has not been okay. I've wrested with this for so long. But like, if you've, yeah, yeah.

But also, give us a bit more. Right from the very beginning, Bonnie tells us, and the narrator tells us, she knows he doesn't have those feelings for her. So it's confirmed over and over again, he is giving absolutely no sign of feelings. He has no feelings for her. And then it just sort of just changes when great, for the plot reasons, now we can see he's got feelings. We could have known he had feelings the whole way through. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I really, I enjoyed reading it.

And I felt the same as I did with Cleopatra and Frankenstein that I was just, even though there were things, I was like, oh, weird. And she describes the sky so many times. And she uses the phrase chlorine blue three times, which again I was like surprised then the editor hadn't picked up on that. So I was like, oh, you've already said that. Okay, fine. But I was very happy to like turn the page and find out. Once I really got really started to get into it,

I felt like it was a page turner at night. Yeah, it was. But I think for me it was Avery and her story that really, I really was just so invested in. And I just recognised traits of myself in her. And I felt like she was really quite fully rounded in so many ways. I just want to see more, more, even more of her story.

It definitely is a good story. So to go back to the Spice Girls moment, which was one of our worst moments. Absolutely livid about this Spice Girls moment. Can I tell you why? It's a story about getting taken to a Spires Girls concert, but your mum didn't want to go with you. Sure, she just paid for you.

But she gave the card. What a bitch, yeah. And then she gave away the T-shirt. Now, I do understand, you know, a parent giving away something that's yours. But I also understand, that's the kind of thing parents sort of have to do for plaintiffs. You gave her yours after that, asked Avery.

Bonnie nodded, still gently holding the shirt. She was so upset afterwards. Remember her crying when she got home. she sobbed until a blood vessel underneath her eye bursts. Grow up, everyone. Grow up everyone. But when they were teenage girls. This is a story about how hard their life is.

This is why they were on heroin. Come on. So I think she's, I think you're annoyed from your personal. Get up at AA and say someone go away your spice girls t-shirt. But I would have, as a teenage, because it was a die-hard. Until you die-hard Spice or Spine, I would have cried.

I'm not saying you can't cry. I mean, I probably would have been slapped for crying. This is what I mean about when I would go. Do you mean that? If Cheryl had taken you take that t-shirt and then giving it away. She did. She did. So you wouldn't have cried.

You'd just got Cheryl back. My mum would just throw away things. We put in the washing basket that she didn't like and say that the washing machine had eaten them. And I didn't know that washing machine didn't chew up clothes. This is where it's actually all stemming from Sarah. Now we've got to the crux of your feeling towards a bob. She could have just said she was so upset.

It's the bad writer of going, does she mean she burst a blood vessel? Have you ever burst a blood vessel in your eye? I have from vomiting in Lanzarotti. So I know the kind of force You have to put on an eye blood vessel For it to burst I really hope one day we get Cocoa Mellas on

And she sits there and she's like Yes Sarah I did burst a blood vessel When Spice Girls break home I would like to play Avery In the TV adaptation Of Blue Sisters So I think I think Yeah you do Avery

I'll be Bonnie I think You know I just see it natural casting And you could be scripted And you can be scripted Yeah Cleopatch and Frankenstein She said took her five years to write

And had 30 rejections This one No, the first one, Cleopatra's right. Five years. And I don't... Does that feel quite... That's not too long. So I don't know if that feels like that.

Yeah, a decent amount of time. To get book that honed, definitely. And I feel like... And she was rejected. How many times? 30 times. From 30 different publishers? It's sold over 200,000 copies.

Like, it's a huge, huge success. And it massively also part to book talk and the sad girl book movement. Oh, right. Okay, is that how it got picked up then? Yeah, that's when it kind of nuts. And then it was featured in Sexner City and Just... like that, Carrie had it on her

bedside table, which I think... Gosh, wow, the power of that kind of stuff is crazy, isn't it? But for me, I definitely felt like, I felt like it needed a bit more of an edit. It felt like it was quite a long. I definitely need more of an edit because there were some words

that were just missing out of the... I'm not there entirely, like, and on... I'm just gonna give you another example of a description of a character where I thought, is that what you mean? Okay. Because sometimes she was describing people

that I felt were not very realistic. Here's go, this is about Nikki. Nikki's dead. Nikki was different. Nikki was always the first person to ask a question in the Q&A section of a talk because she couldn't bear for the person on stage to experience awkward silence after having made themselves vulnerable.

Do you think that is a personality trait? Yes, because I do that. Always. And when she wrote it, I thought, oh my God, that is me. Great, okay, thank you. I will always lead. Because I could imagine someone doing it once. That person seems a bit awkward.

Not every Q&A, but... She's written, always the first person. So this woman, all I need to know about her, she's dead, I'm not going to meet her. Hand in the air, is it? She tries, that's not a person to tell you she's kind. She's trying to tell you she's kind. No, but I got, yeah, exactly, I got the subtext of that, which is always, if I'm in a room and I can feel someone's even slightly being left out,

I will go, I feel like I'd go above my, mumme on to accommodate. But I think that's, okay. I can see what she was trying to get at, but that isn't what she's written. I think, as well with Nikki, there was... She could have said she did it once, and it was, and with no, it was a memory of kindness. But there was so many descriptions of Nikki doing, being, like, wonderfully kind. Jesus. Like, it kept, and I...

I wanted to see Nikki flawed. Yeah, I felt like we're... Sometimes being an absolute dick because we all are. We were missing that. Nikki became a saint. And they even say that, like, she's not a saint. She was our sister. I was like, all three of you have ever said is like, she was a martyr.

And even the fact that she, like, wanted to be a mother. The other three of them, they're not talking about wanting to be mothers out. They're dealing with their own process in their own childhood. They seem quite young. And this thing about Nikki is that she had endometriosis and she could perhaps had less pain if she had been offered a hysterectomy and turned it down because she wants to be a mother. Which is already, again, and it didn't deal with it.

Very complicated for some because endometriosis is so bad to assume they can conceive with their own womb anyway. She is made out to be too perfect. I think all of them, again, the nuance of all of them apart from Avery, I think Avery felt because she is so flawed and she's such as she starts as an addict, she is an addict. So she's having a relapse in terms of her addiction. So I think we really got a sense like you said of Avery was a fully formed, nuanced, flawed character. But I think, yeah, Nikki and Bonnie, and lucky to an extent, slightly felt slightly underwritten. compared to what we needed. I didn't quite believe the extreme version of Lucky either.

I get one going to AA, but then both of them being that. I thought the AA bit was like that's when I started to... I really enjoyed the beginning. I enjoyed it, joined it. And as I could feel it coming to an end, I was like, oh, okay. Because it's not Disney-fi, but it was really like... No, I felt like it was, everything was neatly tied in a boat. That was my thought.

And she talks a lot in her interviews about this book saying, like, it was going to be a much darker ending, but that she suffered a miscarriage, and then she got pregnant again and had her child, and something about that made her want to give a book a hopeful end and give these people a hope and much positive.

She was like, obviously, wonderful, but I felt like Lucky's journey when... I mean, Lucky was performed at Glastow. Yeah, I know. And she was like, you should start. I didn't get it, and I was like, oh, she got drunk at Glaston, Philadelphia, I was like, no, she was like practically headlining

Glastonbury. Anybody in a book when they like turn to music and it turns out, hey my God, they can sing. You're like, oh, no, she's obviously not going to be a pop star. Like, she was just a model. Like, what? Yeah. So I found that. Also, she's a dog.

She's a husky. You told me on page three. There's one thing that. Oh, I know. No, I know. I think I keep bringing it back to things that she does well and that it is enjoyable. No, I just want to say one thing about the end. This angered me.

Again, it's the personal thing. This is a slight spoiler. skip ahead like 20 seconds if you don't want any spoilers. So we find out at the end that Bonnie does have a child. And she says, like they all had been worried for her, but it had been a long labour, not made easier by the reminder from the doctor's say that she was 40. She had, however, managed to deliver as she'd hoped,

without medication or intervention, leaning into the pain as a lifetime of combat had her trained to do. Now she was both satisfied and spent. And I found a woman writing about vaginal birth as if it is the greatest achievement, like winning a fucking boxing match as someone who's had inductions and two C-sections

I literally put the book down was like oh fuck you I kept asking myself is that what she means the writer in her wants to parallel the fact that this is someone who's never ever turned away from pain also didn't do that in childbirth

that isn't what she says but she elevates not using pain medication in childbirth as a noble choice like a box and winning a battle and I was like that is the exact history of the medicalised idea of childbirth that causes women not to get pain-guided. I think it's a failure.

I think it's a failure. When they need it. Because in the 1930s, one man who started the NCT started saying women shouldn't, it is immoral for them to have pain relief during childbirth. And that is what we are now dealing with. And I found that really shocking from a woman to write. And also a pregnant woman who just doesn't know.

She's at the beginning of her NCT thinking she's going to do a mindfulness journey. I just found that really shocking. I was like, yeah, that was the only bit that made me like, well, somebody hasn't had to. There was a few bits of... Well, she hadn't had a baby yet. I saw the person, she was still pregnant.

But yeah, I thought I really enjoyed reading it. I thought it's a good story. I was happy to spend time with them. In a kind of watching an American film way, you're like, yeah, sure. Again, when you say American, I was like, I just see it in England. But I did, I have to say, the ending, I thought, oh, that...

It's just rushed. A lot of it's rough. It felt very, yeah, neat and tidy. And I would say, Cleopatchewan-Frankson is a brilliant book. Yeah. And it does what she's doing here, but just better. Like it felt it needed to feel like it needs a few more drafts

Yeah and it's funny because Keir Patch and Franksland When you start reading it It's about this beautiful woman with like waist-length blonde hair Who looks like her comella's And she's like kind of fucked up but crazy And she meets this crazy guy And at the beginning I was like oh god Oh god

And then she makes them so real And you start to care so much about them And you are like I can't believe these people When I met them I thought oh just rich privileged assholes And you're like Oh no They are so flawed

a nuance and they're doing their best and this is life is hard for everybody and I thought she skated that line so well in that book that I was so surprised how much I loved them and I think she just doesn't do it she doesn't quite manage it with these sisters that's what I think because Tage hasn't read yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah because I enjoyed it so it's like yeah it's like you know slightly more maybe than I did yeah yeah that doing it that way around yeah yeah yeah I didn't have any comparison it's been shortlisted for Waterstone's book of the year so people must be really enjoying yeah I mean like I really found it based on I just genuinely wanted to know what happened and I found it just like a light read.

I know that it was trying to deal with huge topics. I agree with it's a light read. I'm still also grieving in that process and there was just so many observations of grief. Yeah. But then obviously you're, you know, step ahead where you've written books about grief and so some of that stuff felt new to me. Yeah, I thought the grief stuff I did think was really good. And also with grief in terms of how it does touch so many people's lives at different points,

these are stories that need to be told over and over and over again. They're not talking about it or not expressing it as part of the experience. Especially at this age group, women in their 30s as well, which, you know. Yeah, they lost someone at a really young age. Which I lost someone at a young age and it was just, that was just fresh again. Yeah, and dealing with a death that is complicated of like she was sick, but it was an overdose and like the complications of. And the guilt you feel, if you were not there for someone.

And like you said, like, I thought she dealt with that family dynamic really well. And like that sibling down who you want to blame everybody and who can you find out it was, it was lucky's fault because she didn't call her. It was this, but actually, it's no one's fault. People just make their own choices and you can't, as you said, rescue them. So I thought there were elements were really good. I thought it was a great page turn.

I read it very quickly and was enjoying reading it, but I didn't think it was as well crafted as... I don't know if I would have persevered if it wasn't for this in the beginning, but I am really glad I did. Do you often give up on books? Not really, no. The only song that I've really given up on that, I've tried so hard to read as The Prophet song,

which won the Booker Prize. And everyone keeps raving about it. And I don't know whether my headspace has just not been in the right place this year because it is obviously a very heavy book. I think sometimes it's not the right time. Yes, not the right time. I've definitely left books and then come back to them,

being like, oh, like you said, suddenly this is easy to read. And I have to say with this one, we are reading another book for a different episode. That's quite, not it's not heavy, but it's four stories and it's a lot of them very historical. And I really appreciated dipping into just,

New York, London. because I was like, oh, contemporary world, whereas the one we've been reading is quite like this Victorian and then it's like ancient worlds and stuff. Oh, right, okay, yeah. And you have to keep your wits about you because you're like, where am I? What's happening?

What time is it? Whereas I actually was like, oh, it's quite nice to say it. Yeah, it just felt like an easy book to just kind of get through. And I don't mean this disparaging. It's like a good holiday read. Yes. It'd be a great holiday reads. Yeah, but that's great though.

I'm having a good holiday read. And also that is a whole genre of like, yes, yes, yes. I don't want to be crying by the pool. I don't want to be having to Google what words mean. Yeah, exactly. Page a day because it's that one page to start. Oh, you could go on holiday with your friends, part. Everyone could have a read of this. Like, you'd all enjoy it. And I'm undoubtedly sure it's going to be turned into some form of TV show, surely. Like, with Tash.

Tash Outlaw, 5'4, Hometown Hotel, London, London. Spotlight number. Tots, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Weirdo's Book Club. You can find out all about the upcoming book. we're going to be discussing on our Instagram at Sarah and Carriads' Weirdo's Book Club. My novel Weirdo and Carriad's book, You and Us Alone, are both available now, and Carriad's Children's Book.

The Christmas Wichastrophe is in all good bookshops. La la la la la la. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you.