Cleo meets Frank on News Year Eve in a perfect, cliché union. They ride the same elevator together and begin to banter, begin to flirt, and begin the start of their lives together. Cleo, 24, is a struggling artist in New York City, and Frank, 43, owns an advertising agency.
They get married one month later because they love each other and also, she needs a green card.
Cleo: depressed, British, beautiful.
Frank: alcoholic, workaholic, handsome.
This is Coco Mellor’s debut book, “Cleopatra and Frankenstein,” a story about a girl who struggles being loved.
“When the darkest part of you meets the darkest part of me, it creates light.”
Her and Frank move in together after their wedding and while she claims to be a painter in their first interaction, she doesn’t paint their whole marriage. Frank tells everyone she is a painter, but he has never seen her paint, he admits.
Cleo’s mother killed herself when she was in college and her father remarried shortly after, leaving Cleo behind, prompting her to move to New York by herself. Frank’s father is absent and his mother is an alcoholic, so in turn, he becomes one too.
Cleo begins to resent Frank throughout their marriage, and in a moment of despair and loneliness, she attempts suicide. Frank’s drinking gets out of control, she loses her friendships slowly, she stops living. They both cheated on each other. She, physically. He, emotionally.
The end of their relationship started on the first day they met.
“She had not wanted him to see her sadness, which was so ugly and so old.”
What is so poetic about depression? You can try to make it sound like a religion in itself, you can romanticize being trapped because your brain is malevolent, but the truth is, depression will never be art. The art will never be worth the price of your pain, the price of your self.
Cleo purposely hurts herself, self-sabotages — in more ways than one — because she wants to prove she can be loved. She wants Frank’s love to prove that.
What’s she asking is: Can you love me when my brain doesn’t love me? Say yes, please. Please stay. Please, please, please.
It is easy to use an attractive, young woman in her early 20s as the perfect image of the struggling artist. Your 20s are already difficult, why not make it worse? Why not suffer for the sake of suffering? Artists — of any kind, really — feel the need to struggle to make purposeful art. Or, this is what people except out of them. You need to suffer to prove yourself. It is a popular trope, used in many books, film and television. But there is nothing romantic about blood stained soil or excessive self-sabotaging tendencies.
“No, Eleanor’s not like either of us.” / “But how do you stop tap dancing if you’re like us?”
By the end, Frank starts dating his coworker, Eleanor, who is exceedingly normal (and also his age). Eleanor is used as a clear plot device, as the foil to Cleo. It is almost laughable how the two characters are used. Cleo, in all her damaged glory, stays single, but she finds happiness after getting help and moving to Rome to be an artist’s apprentice (she is finally painting), and Frank finds love, a love that is stable and normal and doesn’t require telling the other person that they’re fucked up. Frank gets sober at the end of the book, and Cleo never got to experience sober Frank. Eleanor did.
Frank knows how to love Eleanor, but he doesn’t know how to love Cleo. Eleanor was brought up in a stable family, something which Cleo and Frank didn’t experience.
Frank tells Cleo, “You and I didn’t get that love — not because we didn’t deserve it, we just got dealt with something else. But the people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us. More secure… They just don’t feel they have to do the tap dance, you know? They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.”
They were both proving to each other that they could be loved. Cleo, more than him, because he never knew what to do with all her sadness. He never felt sadness, but anger. Anger at Cleo, at his mother, at the world.
Should you read this book? Debatable. It explores typical stereotypes and tropes about people – alcoholics, starving artists, drug addicts, sex addicts, sugar babies, Jewish women, pretentious New York elites – and whether or not that’s on purpose, it is hard to tell. You can appreciate the mental health aspect of it, but it also makes it sound romantic and poetic on one too many occasions.
One thing to appreciate about this book is the acknowledgement that love is not meant to be proven. It is simply there.
