A book I wish I never read
As soon as I started to read the blurb, I knew I had made a mistake.
I had been coaxed into purchasing this book by the sheer number of times it had appeared as an Instagram advert. Powerless before the algorithm, I finally gave in and bought it, without too much exploration into what it was actually about. So when I eventually picked it up, opened the cover and started perusing the inside jacket copy, I felt an initial rush of excitement that quickly segued into dread, as I realized the blurb could easily have passed for one of my own diary entries.
The book in question, Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors, tells the story of the young, angelically beautiful British student Cleo who, adrift in a New York that she will shortly be kicked out of thanks to US immigration, succumbs to the charms and eventual marriage proposal of an older, debonair man named Frank, in pursuit of that most elusive thing: the Green Card. With the exception of a couple of epithets (angelically beautiful and also possibly ‘young’ in my case, although perhaps that one could stay if we added ‘-ish’; older and debonair in the case of my ex-boyfriend-soon-to-be-ex-husband), Cleopatra and Frankenstein is essentially a book that tells the story of the last year of my life. A rash and probably ill-advised marriage undertaken during a whirlwind romance, and its inevitable ending in tears (and deportation).
My sister and I have a joke that whenever we see ‘The year was…’ on the back cover of a book, we fling it away immediately. We have no interest in reading about the past, or a dystopian future, or even a utopian future; we only want to read about characters exactly like us. But when does reading about characters that are ‘just like you’ cross over into the disconcerting territory of reading your exact experience? How far is it healthy to go in the quest for relatability, of feeling seen?
There was certainly a lot for me to relate to in Cleo’s description of New York. Despite an endless stream of party invites, upscale restaurants and mountains of seemingly free cocaine, Cleo and I both found New York to be an extremely isolating place. Although I too attended rooftop party after rooftop party, I could never quite shake the feeling that no-one would have really cared if I was there or not. Although, like Cleo, I was fortunate enough to make a couple of close friends, my overwhelming experience of New York socialising was being surrounded by a glittering cast of fascinating characters who you would have one conversation with and then never see again. Living in New York made me feel like I didn’t know how to connect with people, like I constantly had to prove my worth; prove that I was interesting enough to be at this party, or be invited to this upstate cabin, or to this birthday dinner. Reading that someone else, be they fictional or not, also struggled in a city where most people don’t wait until you’ve finished your story before they start to tell their own, superior one, was validating. It made me feel like less of a loser.
Similarly, Cleo feels the absence of a sense of belonging, of a home. In her case she feels she has nothing to go back to in England, so has to make her life in New York work, whether or not it’s actually making her happy. She made her bed, she had to go lie in it, etc. In my case, I had plenty to go back to in England, but the whole point of moving to New York was to have a challenging, exciting experience, regardless of whether being challenged 24/7 is actually enjoyable, and going back to England before my time was up always represented a failure in my eyes. It would mean I had failed to conquer New York, a city I have called, on more than one occasion, ‘inhospitable to human life’, that I had failed to merge seamlessly into a place where I knew no-one – just a straight-up failure. And the fear of admitting to that failure is what allowed me to continually overlook things in my own relationship (marriage) that might otherwise have given me pause. The stakes were too high. I had to make it work. There was no-one in my real, 3D life who could relate to the pressure of having put all your eggs in one basket and then having to drag that basket around with you. But Cleo got it.
On the other hand, there were acute differences between mine and Cleo’s experiences that made the book a somewhat unsettling read. The disparity, for example, between Cleo and Frank’s ‘oh, we just threw it together’ wedding, which was catered by New York’s hottest chef, who just happened, of course, to be Frank’s best friend; Cleo’s vintage makeshift wedding dress which she realises, halfway through the reception, is actually meant to be a nightgown – but oh, how whimsical and funny that is when you’re that beautiful! – vs. my ‘oh, we just threw it together wedding’. It took place over Zoom, mid-pandemic, in my kitchen, and included the pausing of the quote-unquote ‘ceremony’ while I ran upstairs to get the printer because we had filled out the marriage licence incorrectly. It was followed by my friend taking drizzly photos of us on the rooftop to prove the ceremony had happened so we could add them to my Green Card application, and then after she left, my new husband and I made ourselves dinner and went to bed. No wedding presents, no cocktail shrimp. Not even any wedding night sex. Reading about Cleo’s bohemian-fairy tale wedding day made me angry that we hadn’t made more of it ourselves. Cleo’s marriage was about as real as mine was, and yet we had thrown the day away, positioned it squarely in the ‘funny story’ category. Which was fine, as long as we were still married. Once we got divorced, I found I wanted more of a strong memory to hang onto than me crouching on the kitchen floor trying to get the printer to work.
The other main difference between our two stories is the drama of it all. While Cleo’s marriage ended with a bang – throwing a bucket of water over a performance artist at some glitterati party on Roosevelt Island and being dragged off by security – mine ended with a whimper. Hours spent on the bus back and forth from the grey square of the Brooklyn courthouse, printing and notarizing and signing, waiting and foot-tapping and crying. While I obviously understand that the book is fiction, and intended as entertainment above all else, and that no-one in their right mind would want to read about the actual minutiae of getting divorced, it still annoyed me. In Cleo’s universe, the simple errand of purchasing a hoover from Craig’s List involves your best friend sexually propositioning the unsuspecting couple who are selling it to you. In my universe, selling all of my possessions pre-moving back to England consisted mostly of working out which Facebook marketplace messages were from bots and which ones I could safely give my address to. Cleo ended up, post-divorce, in an artist’s colony in Rome. I was back in dreary London with four flatmates and a job that paid barely over minimum wage. It made me feel like I had played this all wrong. Why didn’t I try and join an artist’s colony? Why didn’t I, at the very least, go to Rome?
Reading Cleopatra and Frankenstein made me question whether it is more cathartic or more harmful to read about your exact experience, but depicted by characters more colourful and winning than those that populate your own universe. If what happened to me was worthy of a fictional novel, had all my decisions been ridiculous? I ended up with all the consequences of the rash choice to get married, but none of the aesthetics. There was no trip to Queens to buy a sugar glider from a breeder who then flitted whimsically around our loft apartment before drowning in a toilet after my alcoholic husband left the seat up; there was no honeymoon in the South of France. There was only paperwork, and packing, and a long, sad flight home. ‘Feeling seen’ certainly has its merits: a sense of camaraderie, validation, comfort. But the problem with being seen is that then you have to deal with what you’re actually looking at.
Perhaps dystopian fiction would have been a better choice. At least that way there would be no superior version of myself to measure up to, no realisation that all the decisions I made had been wrong.
Written by Megan Jones.
Megan Jones is a 30-year-old writer living in London. Her work has been featured in Riposte Magazine, Polyester Zine, and Pinhole Cinema. She also writes a weekly newsletter which can be found here.
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