Julia's Book Club – Blue Sisters
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As a woman who hasn't had children and has talked about that publicly, you know, I think it is good for us to have open discussions about all of the reasons that women choose or don't choose to become mothers. Especially now with vats, saying all the Democrats are childless cat ladies. Vats.

And what I loved about that, that whole awful thing that he said, was that all the women who responded with great humour and sort of kneecapped him with comedy to show that we, you know, we're childless cat ladies are a formidable force and very, very funny. Hello and welcome to another episode of our book club and I'm delighted to be joined by the wonderful, the witty, Cathy Lesh. Woohoo!

Now, Cathy, this is not going to make Australian listeners happy because they're shivering in the middle of winter. But we're in London and we were together Sunday having a long, slow Sunday lunch in beautiful sunshine. I know. Amazing. The whole of the English summer, the sun kind of rang in sick and just didn't turn up. So we had this one glorious day just...

Just slowly drinking wine. It was like that Tim Minchin song, you know, white wine, sipping white wine in the sun with my favourite friends. It was delicious. You were the most scrumptious part of that human menu. Thank you very much. And I didn't get sunburned, so that's good. Not that often in London you have to worry about sunburn. But even though we have been drinking wine,

wine in the sun. We've also been reading and the novel that we're discussing today is Blue Sisters, which is the second novel from Coco Mellers. Listeners might recognise that name. She had a best-selling debut with Cleopatra and Frankenstein. So this is her second book and it has rocketed up the charts. It's selling very well. If you've been wandering around a bookshop, you've probably seen it on the tables. So discuss

despite being a popular fiction, the novel does tackle some pretty heavy themes. It centres on the Blue Sisters. That's not their colour. They're not aliens. That's their surname. And they are Bonnie, Avery and Lucky. And they are reeling from the sudden and tragic death of their fourth sister, Nikki, who died from an accidental overdose.

The novel is set a year on from Nicky's death and opens with the sisters really scattered around the world and effectively estranged. Bonnie's in LA, Avery is in London and Lucky is in Paris. And as the story unfolds, we see the ripple effects of Nicky's death and how the sisters attempt to navigate it all and come back together. We learn a lot about their past lives as this process is going through.

Now, sisterhood is obviously the huge theme here. And you and I, I think we're suckers for discussions on sisterhood because we're both blessed with sisters. I've got only one sibling, my older sister, Alison. But there's a pride of let siblings, like a pride of lions. I know, it's so true. I'm so lucky. My mother gave me the greatest gift imaginable, three sensational sisters.

And we have a psychological shorthand where we know what each other are thinking and we can finish these other sentences. They're the most...

formidable, loyal and loving support team. I mean, when one of us is going through a rough time, the other three kind of rally with offers of chicken soup or internal organs or whatever we need. And if one of us is under attack, you know, the wagons kind of circle, although it's not really wagons, I'd have to say having three formidable sisters on your sides, like having a bomb-proof, flame-retardant, armoured vehicle on hand for like

Quick getaways. And I would say my sisters constantly lift me sort of two octaves up on the happiness scale. And even without realising that they're doing it. And just the quipping and the quaffing and the laughter. I mean, it is the greatest gift. We're like Orion's belt. There we are, always sort of lined up alongside each other. And whenever I feel lost and can't find my place in life, they're like my bookmark. And I imagine your sisters like your bookmark.

But the sisters in this novel...

I felt were lacking in joy and comedic camaraderie because I'm sure with your sister too, we cackle like kookaburras the whole time. We do do a fair bit of cackling, that's true. And it's sort of how you get through your worst times because if you've got those, if you're lucky enough to have that strong sibling connection, even when our darling dad died, we found the funny, we found laughter, which was like, you know, a pressure valve being able to, you know,

be together and somehow find humour through it all. But these sisters, I just felt they were joyless and juiceless and every time they were together they were bickering without being also, you know, loving and supportive and that's what I didn't quite...

didn't work for me in this novel. I mean, there was one fabulous quote which I actually typed out and sent to my sisters. I've written it down to read out to you. Being one of four sisters always felt like being part of something magic. Once Bonnie noticed it, she saw the world was made up of fours. The four seasons, the elements, the points of the compass, four suits in a pack of cards, four chambers of a human heart. Bonnie loved being part of this mystical number. This

this perfect symmetry of two sets of two. Until you know my sisters, she used to say, you don't know me. And I think that is true of my sisters, but I didn't feel these four sisters had anything in common at all, except this unusual upbringing and their painful sense of grief at losing their other sibling. How did you feel?

Yeah, I felt very much the same. I think there are some beautiful lines about sisterhood throughout the novel. That's wonderful. The four and must have really resonated for you having four sisters. I liked the opening lines of the prologue. A sister is not a friend who can explain the urge to take a relationship as primal and complex as a sibling and reduce it to something as replaceable, as banal as a friend. Yeah.

Yet this status is used again and again to connote the highest intimacy. My mother is my best friend. My husband is my best friend. No. And she goes on to say, true sisterhood is about sharing, and I'm quoting now, an umbilical cord. Tough, tough.

sinuous, unlovely, yet essential, and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend. And I liked all of that. I thought some great lines about sisterhood. And of course, some of my best loved novels are sister novels, Pride and Prejudice, little women novels like that.

But there was something for me inherently not believable about these four sisters. And it was in their interactions, which I agree were all very argumentative, bickering on the difficult side, but also in the character descriptions themselves. I mean, when we go through them one by one,

Avery, she's the older sister, the sort of self-appointed leader, and because of difficulties in their background, she's had to take on the maternal role, whether or not she's wanted it. You know, her backstory is heroin addiction, overcoming it, and then finally becoming a very straight-laced and incredibly successful lawyer.

Then there's Bonnie, the next sister along, who is a world-class boxer. And then Lucky, the baby of the family, who since the age of kind of 14 or 15 has been on a glamorous lifestyle of jet-setting and partying because she's a world-famous model. She puts the fun into dysfunction, really.

She must have been having quite some fun, but then addiction rears its head. And the sister they lost, Nikki, is the only one that you would say has an ordinary life, if I can use that term. She's a teacher. She's a teacher. And she's the one I think I would have liked.

She's the one I wanted to get to know, but she's absent from the novel. She is largely absent from the novel. I mean, we hear a bit of her backstory, but we clearly don't get to know her in the same depths as we get to know the other characters who are trying to feel their way through in the wake of the grief of losing Nicky.

Nikki, we learned, died of an accidental overdose after she became addicted to pain medication for untreated endometriosis. And that's her central tragedy. She wanted to be a mother. And so when things were being recommended to her, like she could have a hysterectomy and that

might fix it. She didn't want to give up on her dream of having a child. So she battled with the pain. That led her to a dependence on painkillers and then to a fatal overdose.

So grief weaves this together, but so does addiction. All of them have got addiction issues in different ways. Nikki, clearly, Lucky is battling addiction, you know, cocaine, alcohol, you name it, everything, everything. We get an insight into her partying lifestyle where almost any substance you want to take is available. She's sort of a sex addict too, I would say. Yeah.

Yes, yeah, and I think that's woven in. And then Avery's overcome the heroin addiction. But she's a workaholic now. And she's a workaholic now. And Bonnie the boxer is the clean liver. She's never drunk, never taken drugs. Obviously her body has to be in the right shape to do the boxing. But she's effectively addicted to that lifestyle and in some ways addicted to the pain that it brings. Yes. And they're the product of parents with...

particularly their father's dependence on alcohol. So I thought, you know, that theme was an interesting one as well as the theme of dealing with grief. And we did get some insights into addiction through these individual stories, but I'm not sure in total it actually took us anywhere particularly new. Well, luckily you and I are only addicted to reading. LAUGHTER

A happy addiction. But yes, I feel the same. It didn't tell me anything particularly new about that. And also, you know, if I lost one of my sisters, I should have been crying my whole way through this book. But I didn't feel that at all. I just felt it was very, it was somehow cold and a bit removed. It didn't ever move me emotionally. I don't know about you. I mean, I should have been going through boxes of Kleenex on a daily basis. But it felt to me a little bit contrived, all of that.

Yeah, I wasn't emotionally moved either. We don't want to do spoilers, but I think we can safely say without having to go spoiler alert, spoiler alert, that there is some uplift and reconciliation towards the end of the novel.

But even that didn't sort of take me to a new place. Too little, too late, I felt. But I feel, you know, kind of ambivalent in the sense that there are some great individual lines. One line is,

that really caught my attention was talking about their father and he's a sort of absent figure in the back story yet we know that his violent drunken outbursts were a feature of the lives that they lived and she writes Coco this beautiful line

He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods. That is actually a beautifully phrased emotion, isn't it? And that stood out for me as well. And how many women and girls live with that emotion every day?

And I would have liked actually more, a little bit more about how they survived that abuse in their childhood. But it's just hinted at, isn't it? It's just like a kind of motif in the background that never really resonates.

It's an explanation for Avery having to jump into the mother role because apart from the father's dysfunction as an alcoholic with violent moods, the novel is also very critical of the mother of the four sisters, the daughter.

In the book, she's described in the following terms, their mother wasn't really a mother and Avery, who is the eldest, covered for her. Their father wasn't really a father and their mother covered for him. Trying to change them now would be needlessly painful for everyone.

And, you know, Bonnie, one of the sisters, reflects that their mother always fed them and she never hit them, but she was overwhelmed by them. It was like she was on a solo mission because she was the only parent who was functioning. She regretted starting but had resigned herself to completing. Now, that sentence is actually about preparing the evening meal for these four hungry sisters.

growing girls obviously wanting their food. That's a line I also pulled out to talk about because that rang true to me. Yes, and I think we're supposed to take from that that whilst that's a line about the evening meal, it's really a line about motherhood and having the sisters overall. And that to me was the most interesting aspect of the book because it does capture the ambivalence many young women are feeling about motherhood now.

You know, we know that the birth rate has plummeted in the West and young women, young people are embracing celibacy. They instead of having sex, they're having they call it Netflix and chill. And the cost of living crisis is making parenthood unattractive. And I also think it's the career sabotage for women because our generation, you know, we thought we could have it all.

But we just ended up doing it all. And I now think, yes, women can have it all but not all at once. And it's women whose careers usually suffer when the children come along. And a lot of young women are just thinking they're just not buying into that. And I wrote a book in 1999 called Mad Cows, which took the idea that motherhood was the ultimate fulfillment for a female. I took that big sacred cow and I whacked it on the barbie. Yeah.

And I remember when I wrote that book, I thought maybe I'm the only mother who's not coping because I was in England at the time. I kept meeting these English women. I'd say, oh, my God, this is so hard, this whole motherhood thing. And they'd just say, oh, have you thought about therapy? So I thought, well, I'm the only mom, you know. And when I wrote that book, I thought this might be the end of my literary career. Well, of course, it so resonated with women that someone was telling the truth.

And it was all about the idea that when you're pregnant, everyone has so much advice for you, but nobody prepares you for what comes next. Cracked nipples, constipation, mountains of hemorrhoids. I mean, Edmund Hillary couldn't scale those rat bags, you know. Then there's the sleep deprivation, the sex deprivation, because kids are a contraceptive. Every time you go to make love, the baby wakes up or the toddler toddles in. I was in Manchester once, a book tour, and this woman there gave me a fantastic sex tip for new parents.

Vaseline on the doorknobs. It sounds painful, but they can't get in. And then I used to think, does any new mother really want to have sex? No, I think a new mother's favourite position is the doggy position where he begs and you just roll over and play dead. But, you know, nobody really writes or talks about that very much. So in this book, I thought it was an interesting area to explore the ambivalence all the sisters feel about

about becoming a mother because they haven't had a good role model in their own mothers. And also they're pretty self-engrossed, all three of them. I can't imagine them, you know, giving up any of their precious time to put themselves second. And, you know, and motherhood, yes. It's time we talked about all of this more, that it is very boring. I mean, sometimes I was so bored doing creative things with Play-Doh, I could see my plants engaging in photosynthesis. LAUGHTER

Once I grew a yeast infection as a change of pace. So I suppose women are waking up to that fact. So that to me was the most interesting aspect of the book, although I'm very against blaming mothers for everything. I think if you can get your kids to 16 and they're not collecting Nazi memorabilia or voting for Donald Trump,

You deserve a mothering medal. You can't keep blaming your mum for everything. You and I are lucky enough to have wonderful mothers, but even my friends who had and have difficult relationships with their mothers, they're not blaming them for everything now that they're adults. You know, you have to stand on your own two psychological feet at some point. So I was a bit down on that, that all the mothers, the two mothers in the book are painted with so much...

derision and hostility. Did you feel that? Yes, I did. I mean, on this motherhood theme in the book, I liked that the book interrogates one of the characters thinking through and ultimately making a decision not to become a mother. And we won't do any spoiler alerts about which character it is. I thought to convey that

was a really interesting potential theme. And so this is a character who originally has said to her partner, I don't want to have children. Then as her partner over the years becomes more insistent, it becomes a huge issue as to whether or not she's going to have children. And she says yes and then effectively retracts it with all of the consequences for the relationship that you would imagine. I thought that was...

a really interesting theme and often not done in books, but not delved into in the depth that I would have liked to have seen. Me too. You know, I think there was more to go on that theme. Who chooses to have children? Who doesn't? Why? How all of these choices are legitimate choices and women make them for different reasons. And as a woman who hasn't had children and has talked about that publicly, you know, I think it is good for us to have...

open discussions about all of the reasons that women choose or don't choose to become mothers. Especially now with Vance saying all the Democrats are childless cat ladies. Cat ladies. And what I loved about that whole awful thing that he said was that all the women who responded with great humour and sort of kneecapped him with comedy to show that childless cat ladies are a formidable force and very, very funny.

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But I would have liked to have delved more into that as well because it's something women don't want to really talk about. And there's actually now anonymous websites where mothers can write in and say that they regret their decision to have children and it's something they couldn't say in public.

But I would also say I adore my progeny with a primal passion. I think, you know, children can be the greatest love affair of your life. Just to be upbeat about motherhood for a second, I think the secret is to never try to be a perfect mother. I think perfect mothers only exist in American sitcoms. Yes. So a good enough mother is absolutely fine. But, you know, your life will change. As the character mother says in the book, having children, I suddenly felt I'd landed on Mars because nobody prepares you.

Mothers do not get an easy time in this book. So there's the mother of the four girls, alcoholic husband. She is portrayed as someone who really met their needs. You know, they were never going to die of hunger or thirst or not have medical attention, but never showed up.

love or warmth or inclusion towards them. No emotional nourishment. No emotional nourishment. And there's a pivotal scene where she is confronted by Avery, the oldest daughter, about how addiction is a theme in their family. And her initial reaction is to dissemble in the face of that, to not grip it. Avery says to her, Dad's in rehab. I can't drink. Bonnie Wisely never started. Lucky years.

Well, it's a miracle she's alive and Nikki overdosed, Mum. Our family has a problem, Mum, a really serious problem.

Her mother crossed her arms and paused. Avery could practically see the cogs of her brain whirring as she decided which tack to take between denial, delusion and defensiveness. So she comes off as, you know, cold and unable to deal with issues. And then the only other mother really portrayed in the family is the mother of Avery's partner. Avery is married to a woman called Chitty and...

Chitty's mother, you only see her on TV. There's a scene where Avery and Chitty and Chitty's brother are grouped around a television watching Chitty's mother on TV. And she is a sort of cold academic who is known for...

anybody in the audience who poses a question basically gets ripped up, gets a swipe across the face and somehow they kind of love it, the audience. They all are in this conspiracy together where they're going to ask her questions and she's going to put them down. But she certainly does not come across as a nice person. Well, the line, did you write, I wrote this line down when Avery's talking about her partner's mother. She said, Chitty's desire to love her mother...

breached the surface of her disdain like a seal club, peeking its head above the ocean. The problem with Gnishka, that's the mother, the problem with Gnishka was that you never know if you were going to get cuddled or clubbed. Cuddled or clubbed with the image of a seal cub. No, that is not good, not good. And so you think too hard, too harsh, or to not have...

you know, more nuance in the role modelling of mothers. Well, as I am a mother and I am sort of 65, I felt that the mothers were very badly served in this book because what about all the...

millions of unsung kindnesses they'd done. You know, mothers just get such a bad rap. Where are the statues going, you know, oh, single mother, you know, a toddler and a day job? You know, where are the statues to these mothers? You never see them. And when they worked out, the American Bureau of Statistics worked out how much it would cost to replace a mother. And it's something like, you know, £150,000 a year. You're the chauffeur, you're the cook.

You're the schlepper. You're the laundress. You do all the homework. You go to the parent-teacher nights. There's a lot of unpaid labour. And there must have been times where the mothers were emotionally kind because the girls are not actually – they do know how to love each other eventually. So I just felt that it was so unfair to the mums.

that I want to just stick up for mum just for a moment. Yeah, I thought that the sister's mum got a...

much harder bad rap compared with the alcoholic violent father. Exactly. And we never even hear about Chitty's father where he is. I mean, it's all Freud's fault. He's the one who blamed mothers for everything, paging Dr. Freud to reception. So I do kick back against that a bit. I think the trouble with parentals is that you don't get an owner's manual. You know, you're just suddenly a parent.

And, you know, then you become like a runner up in the human race and you have to make it up as you go along. Kids are like IKEA flat pack furniture. Like you get it and you have no idea how to assemble them. So, you know, my sympathy, my heart always goes out to the mothers who are trying to make the best of a bad situation. So that did irk me about the book as well. I wanted to say to the author, have a baby and then we'll talk.

And the author actually was pregnant when she was writing this. So she's having that baby. She needs to be ringing Cathy Lett. Coco Mellis, if you're listening to this, ring Cathy Lett. Oh, my God. What I'll say to her is if only there was a creative epidural because when you're writing a book, it is like giving birth, giving birth to a book. And it's like, but there's no pain relief. So at least she can get pain relief.

I can imagine book clubs doing this book that motherhood is going to be a big theme of the discussion. And so sisterhood, addiction, motherhood, there are these grief, of course, there are these big themes in the book. And I think both of us are saying that it's...

It deals with them, but we were left wanting a bit more depth, a bit more nuance. But there are some wonderful, wonderful lines in it. So, you know, it's light and shade in that sense. I thought the description of Chitty and Avery's marriage was beautifully done. The words are,

Harmony was the best word that Avery could think of to describe their life together. They had their arguments like any couple but their daily life was harmonious. Avery had previously thought love was built on large visible gestures but a marriage turned out to be the accrual of

I thought that was lovely. I also marked that. That was a very tender, tender passage. But

But that's with her wife. With the sisters, I just felt they had enough chips on their shoulder to kind of open a casino. They're all so angry with each other that I didn't ever feel that great sense of love and sisterly camaraderie between them. And you were talking earlier about, well, we said how wonderful it is to have sisters. But for women listening who don't have sisters...

We do have the sisterhood, and I must say my Australian women friends I treat almost like extra sisters because Australian women are, I think, the world's best kept secret. Funny, fiercely loyal, fabulous, feisty. For example, two women who slept with the same man in Australia are called stick sisters. It's a sense of camaraderie rather than rivalry. It's like, you slept with him too, wasn't he terrible? I have never found that same...

sense of love and loyalty with other women friends all around the world as we do with Australians. So if you're not lucky enough to have sisters, you do have a wonderful sisterhood which you can lean into as well. And this novel is about...

sisters and their sisterhood, but it's not about the broader sisterhood. Other than the explanation of Nikki being let down by the medical profession, which was uncaring about her endometriosis, it's really not put in a broader social context. There's not much delving into how the individual experiences of these sisters are

The holidays are all about sharing with family. Meals, couches, stories, grandma's secret pecan pie recipe. And now you can also share a cart with Instacart's Family Carts.

Everyone can add what they want to one group cart from wherever they are, so you don't have to go from room to room to find out who wants cranberry sauce, or whether you should get mini marshmallows for the yams, or collecting votes for sugar cookies versus shortbread. Just share a cart, and then share the meals and the moments.

Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as 30 minutes. Plus, enjoy free delivery on your first three orders. Service fees and terms apply. Hey, guys.

Have you heard of Goldbelly? It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic, famous foods from restaurants across the country, anywhere, nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food. They ship Chicago deep dish pizza, New York bagels, Maine lobster rolls, and even Ina Garten's famous cakes. So if you're looking for a gift for the food lover in your life, head to goldbelly.com and get 20% off your first order with promo code GIFT.

is located within a broader societal take on women's roles and women's lives. And presumably that was deliberate by the author, by Coco Mellers, that she wanted to tell this intimate story and let you reflect more broadly on how it links to patriarchy and the way in which women are judged and viewed. But she doesn't tease that out for you. No, she doesn't.

And you know, maybe you and I are just lucky that we've got such sensational sisters because the only other person I know who had a lot of sisters was Jessica Mitford. Did you ever meet Jessica Mitford? No, I didn't. Well, you know all the Mitford girls. So one of her siblings was Nancy, the author, and she had a famous line where she said, "Sisters are a defense against life's cruel circumstances."

And Jessica Mitford retorted, sisters are life's cruel circumstances. Because she had, Jessica was a communist. She had to deal with Diana, who was a fascist, and Unity, who adored Hitler, and Debs, who became a duchess. So, you know, I sometimes think in that family, it would have been safer to fly an American jet into Iranian airspace than kind of attend a Mitford family reunion. So maybe there are women listening who don't have

get on with their sisters and have a fractious and difficult time. And we've just been blessed. I don't know. But it'll be interesting to see what our listeners say when they report back to us on the website. So we might just be the lucky ones. We might just be the lucky ones. And now you've reminded us of the Mitford sisters. Maybe we do need to apologise for the initial analysis of Coco's characters. Really, her characters aren't that ridiculous when you compare it with the Mitford sisters.

I mean, all she's trying to tell us is that there's a model, a boxer, a lawyer and a teacher and look at the Midford sisters. It's so true. Yeah, I completely withdraw that original analysis. Apologies to Coco. So any final takeaways? We're very keen to hear about reflections from listeners. There were a couple of funny bits in the book. I liked the way they were talking about the worst things you can say on a first date.

I just wrote them down. One is, "I forgot my wallet." "I just got out." "Is your nose real?" "I think we're cousins." And then the best things you can say on a first date. "I'm over nine inches."

Daddy owns this place, the Chateau Lafitte, please. And I could have done with a bit more of that. Yeah, a bit more of that. I agree. I'm on to a very different jag at the moment. I am reading a book by the goddess, by Hilary Mantel. I, of course, have talked in the past about how much I loved her Cromwell books. Me too. But I'd never read...

A Place of Greater Safety, which is her book about the French Revolution. So I'm all, you know, liberty, equality, fraternity. In the wake of the Paris Olympics, it felt like the right time. Oh, exactly. And there'd been a big dive into that history on a podcast I listened to, The Rest is History. So I learned about the history and now I'm reading Hilary Mantel's book. What are you on to at the moment? She's a literary lioness, isn't she? I mean, just hear her roar. Actually, I'm...

I'm about to actually read something just for escapism. I'm going to read those wonderful books by Mick Herron, you know, who wrote The Slow Horses. They made a TV series about it. Just because it's summer and I just want to have a kind of cackle and I'm just going to lie and wrap myself around a cocktail with a little kind of umbrella in it and just read some frivolous fiction. Absolutely. And Slow Horses is one of those book genres, because there are many books,

One of them that has come to TV, to Netflix or whatever it is, whichever streaming service. And you can love both. I mean, often when you've read the book, you want to cover your eyes when you see it on screen. But courtesy of Gary Oldman as the central character, they're a beautiful couple.

comedic, hilarious watch as well as great books. And then I've got to start a new novel myself. So yeah, pen is poised. Pen is poised. Well, we will wait for that. Thank you, Cathy. Oh, it's such a pleasure. So lovely to see you. So let's go and have some Chateau Lafitte. Some Chateau Lafitte.

Thank you to Kathy and thank you to everybody listening and engaging with our book club. We really love reading your comments and book suggestions, so please head to our Instagram page and let us know what you thought of Blue Sisters. Until next time.

Thank you.

Research and production for this podcast is by Becca Shepard, Alice Higgins and Alina Ecott, with editing by Liz Kean from Headline Productions and recording support by Nick Hilton. If you have feedback or ideas, please email us at giwl at anu.edu.au.

To stay up to date with the Institute's work, go to giwl.anu.edu.au and sign up to our updates or follow us on social media at Jewel ANU. You can also find a podcast of one's own on Instagram.

The team at A Podcast of One's Own acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders, past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples listening today. Thanks for listening, and we hope you'll join us next time.

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