A London poet has accused the bestselling author Coco Mellors of basing one of her characters on him, saying the experience has been “harmful” and led to him having a “mini identity crisis”.
James Massiah, who created a lengthy Instagram post that points out the similarities between him and the character Charlie in Mellors’ Blue Sisters novel, told the Guardian he did so after more than half a dozen people had asked him if the character was inspired by him.
Coco Mellors became a major literary star after the success of her debut Cleopatra and Frankenstein, which sold 200,000 copies, and her latest novel has been one of the most talked about books of this year.
Likened to Little Women by some critics, Blue Sisters became an instant bestseller upon its release in May. The book follows the lives of three sisters and their at times turbulent relationships that are affected by addiction and the death of a sibling.
Massiah’s friends and acquaintances – all independently from each other – told the London poet that a character called “Charlie” bore a strong resemblance to him.
He said: “People were sending little bits of copy and details from the book, ‘he lives with his parents’ or little funny things like that. I went to check it out for myself and was like ‘This is me!’.”
The character has a relationship with one of the sisters, Avery, after they meet at an Alcoholics Anonymous group. Like Massiah, Charlie is also a black poet, who lived at home with his parents in London. He’s also spoken openly about his drug use, sexuality and strict religious upbringing – just as Charlie does in Blue Sisters.
Like the character, he runs a poetry night in an east London pub where a young crowd “sit cross-legged on the floor”, as they do in Blue Sisters.
Charlie and Avery debate the concept of “amoral egoism”, an idea that Massiah has regularly mentioned in interviews, while the character talks about his “party poetry” – a phrase Massiah has repeatedly used to describe his art.
Mellors and Massiah had been acquaintances before the novelist became a BookTok sensation and one of the writers most closely associated with the “sad girl literature” trend.
Massiah says they first exchanged messages over Instagram before meeting and becoming friends in 2018. The pair had periods when they did not speak, he says, but they were in contact shortly before the novel’s release, but Mellors did not mention Charlie or his similarities to Massiah.
In interviews promoting the book, Mellors has spoken about wanting to create a novel that is “deeply compassionate about addiction” (she has been eight years sober) and also be “an example of creativity that isn’t self-destructive”.
But Massiah says the creation of a character that is so similar to him – both in terms of biographical details but also worldview and even the speech he uses – has caused him distress.
After several people contacted Massiah about the character, he said he began to have a “mini identity crisis”, and eventually confronted Mellors, asking if the character was based on him. She said that he was not.
Massiah says he told her he was going to investigate for himself and when so many biographical details matched his, he asked her again if it was based on him. This time Massiah claims Mellors said she should have told him about the character before the book was published.
“More than anything else I think it would have been nice for her to have let me know beforehand,” says Massiah. “To say – there’s a character in the book I’m writing and he bears some similarities to you. Just know that and this book is coming out and I’ve based some elements of this character on you and your life and some of the conversations you’ve had with me’.
“That would have been nice and would have shown some consideration.”
Authors often go to great lengths to ensure characters based on real people cannot be identified in their work.
Details such as age, race and gender can be changed to ensure real people cannot be recognised by others. Writers who do not can face claims for libel and for breach of privacy.
Kristen Roupenian’s viral 2017 short story, Cat Person, became the centre of a debate about using real-life people as the basis for fictional characters.
The story was about a young woman called Margot and an older man called Robert, who was depicted negatively. After it was published another writer, Alexis Nowicki, alleged that biographical details in the story were taken from her life and a relationship she had with an older man.
“What’s difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialised in the most viral short story of all time is the sensation that millions of people now know that relationship as described by a stranger,” wrote Nowicki.
Massiah said that having details from his life appear in a bestselling novel has been confusing and unsettling. “I want some acknowledgment or maybe an apology, or that this was really harmful to a person,” he said.
Blue Sisters publisher 4th Estate/HarperCollins did not respond to several requests for comment.
