Reading time: About 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a metaphors and similes from Coco Mellors…
Coco Mellors is a British writer living in the U.S. and known for her work in novels, copywriting, journalism, and scriptwriting.
Mellors earned a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from New York University (NYU). She has openly discussed her struggles with alcoholism during her teenage and early adult years in New York, achieving sobriety while writing her debut novel, Cleopatra and Frankenstein, which she completed at the age of 26.
Her latest novel, Blue Sisters, earned rave reviews (from publications like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar) but struck me as over-hyped. Still, it included some lovely figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:
- Though her body is like a vaulted oak door, her nature is transparent as window.
- Recently, without the approval of her [modelling] agency, she has chopped off most of her hair and bleached it white. Now, she looks like a combination Barbie, Billy Idol, and a Siberian husky.
- He had the coloring of a golden retriever and the same seemingly indiscriminate desire to please.
- Sometimes, Avery saw Chiti’s desire to love her mother breach the surface of her disdain like a seal cub peaking its head above the ocean.
- The walls were pink, to the color of the inside of a throat.
- The floor kept giving way beneath her like a bouncy castle.
- His words popped against her skin like bubbles.
- Bonnie felt all the life in this home rushing just beneath the surface of the present moment, like running water trapped beneath a layer of ice.
- The house was in a worse state than she’s remembered. Clusters of shingles had fallen off the roof like bald patches on a head.
- The cool air whispered around her skin. Around the pond, a leafy canopy of trees sighed and rustled as if politely rearranging themselves.
