I had been wondering how Coco Mellors seems to have got off very lightly from the non-spurious allegations of Bad Art Friendism surrounding her second book, which I wrote about at the end of last year. And then I heard her on a podcast. It's quite simple: she's charming! And I think there's a relief in the publishing world that this is a marketing friendly author who isn't about to Fossil Free up the place and is more than happy to be sparkly in an interview.

That still doesn't explain what happened there, and it does suggest yet again that publishing’s attempts at taking black artistry seriously was a summer 2020 blip…

From the piece:

‘When I went onto her instagram after the controversy of her basing her black poet character on a real black London artist who calls his work ‘party poetry’ (in the book, the lawyer sister Blue coins the term herself to put on the guy’s work spontaneously in conversation), I noticed that in one recent caption, she spoke of being happy to be wearing red after months of blue outfits. ‘New season, new book to work on, new colours to wear. Not done with blue for good (never! after all, there’s always the paperback tour)…’ I felt sad. Is this what it takes to get two bestselling novels in a post-pandemic age? Colour coordinate your outfits for six months straight with the on-the-nose title of your book? Be as photogenic as Coco to land the 4th Estate marketing campaign of dreams? Whatever happened to writing the best sentences you can muster?’