SINGAPORE – Four sisters, each struggling with addiction in her own way. New York-based British author Coco Mellors’ Blue Sisters is an exploration of her own struggle with sobriety, transplanted to a sisterhood coping with the loss of one of their own.

Over Zoom, the interview immediately delves into the heavy-hitting stuff. There are not many other places to go – Mellors’ best-selling debut novel, Cleopatra And Frankenstein (2022), likewise follows a tumultuous romance plagued by roiling alcoholism.

Mellors is frank about her attraction to the topic. She says: “I’ve been sober for 8½ years now. I’ve always been very open about it. Many people in my family have dealt with addiction and, because of that, I feel I have a perspective on it.”

The difference this time is a steering away from romance and friendship to family. In fact, the Wes Anderson-ian opening chapter takes on an omniscient voice to foil expectations.

“True sisterhood,” she writes, “the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship... Look at an umbilical cord – tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential – and compare it to a friendship bracelet of a brightly woven thread.

“That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”

Sensitively, and propulsively written, Blue Sisters follows Avery, Bonnie and Lucky on the one-year anniversary of their sister Nicky’s death from an overdose of painkillers due to an excruciating case of endometriosis.

Of very different temperaments – they are respectively a lawyer, a boxer and a model – they nevertheless feel the same pull towards destruction as a coping mechanism.

Mellors has a perspicacious talent in incisively sketching out the essence of her characters. Within a chapter, readers will feel they have got a sympathetic grasp of each, even getting a sense of their maternal baggage: “Their mother was afraid of Avery, baffled by Bonnie, intermittently charmed by Nicky and oblivious to Lucky.”

Mellors’ family make-up comprises a sister, a half-brother and a half-sister. Her best friend, though, can consider herself the muse. It was her “magical aura” of having four sisters that led Mellors to the effective premise.

“Being one of four sisters is such an identity marker for anyone. Suddenly becoming three, that would completely shift their own understanding of themselves and their role in the family,” Mellors says.

“Only your sibling will know you through every decade of your life. I wanted to grapple with family history and how it defines our present. What makes love unconditional is often that it has been tested.”

Though it is tempting to posit Mellors as closer to one of the four, the mother of one says she has put a bit of herself in each so they come alive. With eldest sister Avery, it is her tentative road to recovery – “the road gets narrower in terms of how you believe you’re allowed to act”.

For Nicky, it is her fatal desire to be a mother, while for Lucky, it is the death-defying partying that hides a deep longing for connection.

Bonnie, though, required the most “method writing”. Mellors picked up boxing, something she had always enjoyed watching, as a kind of deep hanging out with the character.

“It’s such a psychological sport. It’s really not about how hard your body can get. Obviously, it’s brutal. It’s one of the only sports where the goal is violence. It has a lot of parallels to being a writer in that the vast majority of the work is done with no witness.”

She lists Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway as writers who have been drawn to the sport. “It’s the life of training. A kind of religious devotion, where you do the same thing again and again and again past the point of inspiration. Maybe it’s a bit grandiose, but when I listen to boxers, I think, ‘I know what they are talking about.’”

There are at least two Rocky-esque fight scenes in the book – one an extended sparring session in the gym – but still, it is a fiery confrontation between the sisters that can lay claim to being the most vicious.

Mellors says these harsh arguments were initially not even part of the book, but a suggestion by her editor, who felt the tension in the second half flagged.

A conflict-averse person, she had to be instructed to escalate their grievances with one another. After plotting the beginning and end of their fight, she allows a tussle over a Spice Girl T-shirt to take on hysterical proportions.

“That is true of family fights,” she says. “Family can be so hard to be around, but that history is also why family is so good to be around because who else knows you like that?

“My friends have been through so much together and there’s been a lot of forgiveness, but there’s nothing quite like family for not needing to really apologise to the degree you probably should.”

Her next novel will be set in Paris during the hottest summer in the city’s history, about a woman on the cusp of deciding whether or not to be a mother, drawing on her own experience as a fashion copywriter.

On successfully achieving her dream of becoming a full-time writer after the sale of Blue Sisters, she says: “I spend a lot of time imagining and thinking and travelling and listening to music and reading to write.

“We live in a culture where it’s all about hustling, as it’s wonderful to recognise that even though it doesn’t necessarily look like productivity, that imaginative space is so important.”

Coco Mellors’ Blue Sisters ($18, 4th Estate) is available at Amazon SG (amzn.to/3RWBHnr) and major bookstores.