Incredible Authors Bonnie Garmus And Coco Mellors In Conversation At London’s V&A Museum

Under the magnificent dome of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, celebrated authors Coco Mellors and Bonnie Garmus joined NET-A-PORTER content director Alice Casely-Hayford for a candid in-conversation and cocktail evening. Coinciding with the seventh season of the Incredible Women podcast, Vision and Voice, the panel talk took place in front of a room of creatives and tastemakers, bringing a thrilling synergy between these writers who have shifted the dial in the depictions of women with their work.

Sharing the journeys behind their cult debut novels – Garmus’ Lessons in Chemistry and Mellors’ Cleopatra & Frankenstein – the authors gave intimate insights into these career-defining books, why they felt the stories needed to be told and heard, and their experiences of adapting them for television. They talked about their complex lead characters, Elizabeth (“I was writing my own role model,” said Garmus. “It was really wonderful to sit and write somebody that I really needed… someone I could look up to and someone who was going to say what I wish I’d said”) and Cleopatra (“It’s the darkest parts of [Cleopatra] that somehow connect her the most deeply to others,” said Mellors), and they shared the powerful responses they’ve had from readers around the world.

Garmus and Mellors also discussed the challenges they’ve faced in their work, the multiple rejections they received before their books garnered major success, and how they’ve navigated attention, criticism, and the solitude of writing. Mellors talked about the importance of carving out space to be creative, and how she takes “imagination walks, where I walk myself like a dog around my neighborhood and I just imagine things until the scene is really full”, and Garmus discussed how she takes pressure off herself: “I’m not trying to beat [Lessons in Chemistry]. I’m just trying to write a story that I personally love, and that’s all. I’m not going to read the reviews. I’m going to write with confidence. I’m going to listen to my characters. And just carry on.”

As the talk drew to a close, they both took the opportunity to celebrate the visionary talents who have inspired their own careers – for Garmus, Margaret Atwood: “She has been this beacon… [and] she had a very rocky start… I just admire her strength”; while for Mellors, Zadie Smith: “I think she [pushes herself as an author] with so much integrity and intellectual curiosity… She’s the writer that I look up to.”