Their friends and family struggle equally around them, often pulling them into their painful orbit. With neither of them willing to fully examine their past, they don’t find their way to each other through their pain. Their initial frivolity and charm comes undone as their hasty marriage spirals into betrayal and loneliness. Cleo refuses to acknowledge the true impact of family trauma in her life, while Frank soaks his memories and regrets with alcohol. Marriage is never as simple as a rom-com meet cute, and Cleo and Frank ’ s relationship devolves into a monster of their creation. Mellors fast forwards from their meeting directly to their marriage, which is the subject she really wants to address. They go from newly introduced to newly married in a few months.

With their natural, witty banter-their chemistry is immediately felt-we want them to be together. The novel opens with a charming meet-cute, where young, beautiful artist Cleo meets confident, middle-aged advertising executive Frank while leaving a New Year’s Eve party. This story is not a warm hug on a Sunday morning it’s a wake-up call after a long night. Mellors bravely tells the story of a marriage that never shies away from the uncomfortable she tackles hard subjects without embarrassment or deflection. Though Cleo and Frank had to bear the same accusations of a marriage of convenience, which was neither of our motivations, our stories quickly evolved into something entirely different.Ĭleopatra and Frankenstein is part glamor and part monster, as the name suggests. My elopement was born out of love, seventeen hundred miles of distance, and an international border, while Cleo’s and Frank’s marriage was born out of love and an expiring visa. In Coco Mellors’s debut novel, I was curious to see what she would do with this scenario, long fabled in movies and books, but also very real to me. I was attracted to the novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein because the title characters and I share something in common: a short courtship followed by elopement.

Coco and frankenstein