The novelist Coco Mellors has scored a second bestseller with Blue Sisters , her follow-up to Cleopatra and Frankenstein . But one reader is not happy: the British poet James Massiah, an acquaintance of Mellors, has accused her in a lengthy Instagram post of basing a character in the novel on him. The similarity he sees between him and this flawed character has given him a “mini identity crisis”.
The news has raised a wry smile here. Way back in 1996, I faced a similar accusation when a long-ago ex-boyfriend, literary critic David Sexton, believed himself to be unflatteringly depicted in my novel A Vicious Circle . He threatened to sue and as a result the book’s publication was cancelled by Hamish Hamilton (an imprint of Penguin).
The scandal has lingered in many memories, and at least once a year I get contacted by other writers anxious for advice about how to avoid legal trouble. The conviction among non-writers remains that novelists “put” a real-life person into a work of fiction, sometimes out of vengefulness or spite. But a novel is what it says on the tin – a work with made-up characters and situations.
I may sometimes use a line I’ve heard uttered by a real-life person in dialogue, because it strikes me as funny or revealing, but I would hate for any of my family or friends to believe themselves skewered in my work. And while I can understand why Massiah might feel unsettled, the characteristics he shares with the fictional character in Blue Sisters – .
