Chloé Esposito
‘I really do hope I win the Bad Sex Prize’
The relationship between identical twins has long fascinated popular culture, from Sebastian and Viola in Twelfth Night to
Fred and George Weasley in Harry
Potter. But currently getting publishers – as well as Hollywood – overheated are Beth and Alvina Knightly, the lookalike twin sisters in
Mad, Chloé Esposito’s debut novel. The book is a portrait of just how low that relationship between two people with the same face and genome can sink.
“There’s something you should know before we go any further,” announces self-styled bad-girl Alvie on the opening page of a book hotly tipped as the must-have beach read for millennials this summer, already sold in translation to 25 countries, and in pre-production by the film studio that made Fifty Shades of Grey.
“My heart is in the wrong place… on the right. My sister’s heart is in the right place. Elizabeth is perfect through and through.”
When 31-year-old former English teacher Chloé Esposito read that passage to an audience of literary agents at the end of her stint at the Faber Academy – sometimes referred to as the book world’s equivalent of
The X Factor, on account of its track record in turning wannabe scribblers into bestsellers – she ended up with 21 offering to represent her.
“But doesn’t everyone find identical twins fascinating?” asks Esposito when I congratulate her on her big break over coffee near the north London home that the Oxford graduate shares with her Italian husband, Paolo, and their four-yearold daughter. (She wrote the novel after giving up teaching to bring her up.)
“You always wonder what it must be like having another you. Imagine if you had a doppelganger but their life was completely different. What potential for jealousy and conflict.”
Esposito is effortlessly polite, but surprisingly at ease after being suddenly thrust into the spotlight by a book-and-film deal with several noughts. She is clearly no ingénue. Like Alvina, as pictured on the book’s jacket, and soon to be blown up on billboards and the sides of buses, her blonde hair is tucked coquettishly behind one ear. Which twin, I can’t help wondering, is she going to be?
She grew up in Cheltenham, the only child of a French mother and a father whose work at GCHQ must never be mentioned. “I always had my nose stuck in a book,” she recalls, “because I didn’t have anyone to play with at home. But all my friends had brothers and sisters, so I saw the relationship between sisters, and it was often nasty, violent and toxic.”
It’s a list that doesn’t even begin to describe the hellish relationship she charts between blessed Beth and off-the-rails Alvie. “I thought,” she says, talking me through the creative process, “what would make me the most insanely jealous ever? What about if I had an identical twin sister, who is more successful than me, more beautiful than me, richer than me, married to the man I was in love with.”
And that is the premise of the novel, set at Beth’s luxury villa on Sicily, complete with her good-looking husband, Ambrogio, her infant son, and her walk-in-wardrobe stuffed with designer labels. Alvie visits and seizes her chance in the pages of this racy, pacey Mafia-infused thriller to become her sister for a week. “Unity of time, place and action,” she confirms, quoting a mantra from her academy training.
The plot owes a debt (freely acknowledged) to the global phenomenon that was Gone Girl,
Gillian Flynn’s 2012 page-turner, subsequently made into a film with Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne, the woman who outsmarts men at their own game. “I loved her,” Esposito enthuses, before adding with a flash of steel, “but she’s so humourless. She never cracks a smile.”
Mad, therefore, is not so much the new Gone Girl, but “Gone Girl plus”. (There are two more volumes in the offing to follow Mad, entitled Bad and
Dangerous to Know.) Esposito has added a dollop of Bridget Jones to the mix: “It is kind of a black comedy – Bridget gone bad, 20 years on. She never had Tinder, for example.”
Now we are getting on to another striking aspect of Mad – the sex. Once in Sicily, Alvie has little need for any online dating app as she works her way, hectically and graphically, through almost every man in her sister’s circle, including her oh-sogorgeous brother-in-law who turns out to be not oh-so-desirable in bed.
“I do hope I win the [Literary Review’s famed annual] Bad Sex Prize,” giggles Esposito. “One scene is meant to be really bad sex.”
Turning the tables on men in the bedroom by describing in centimetre perfect detail what women really want might cause others to blush, but not this unapologetic author. “If it were a man sexually objectifying women in the way Alvina does men, for example, you wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. It is just what guys do.”
And has her husband read her novel? “He might wait for the movie…” she answers with a grin. “He’s in finance, and he hasn’t read a novel in the 11 years since I met him.”
Not content merely to entertain, Esposito is keen to enter the gender war. “We forgave [Donald] Trump for grabbing women by the p----. He was elected President of America with women’s votes. Can you imagine if Hillary Clinton had been going around grabbing guys by their crotches? It is gloves-off time for women.”
She is hearing the same rallying cry, she says, in the work of a younger generation of women comedians currently capturing the zeitgeist – the likes of American stand-up Amy Schumer and Britain’s Phoebe Waller-bridge, who recently cracked a joke about wet dreams as she collected her Bafta for Fleabag. “It’s that way of over-sharing they have, and talking about what women really think in their darkest hours. Alvie has a lot of dark hours.”
How does that fit with mainstream feminism, though? “For me, Mad is a feminist novel for this generation. I know that the really strict, strident feminists will read it and think Alvie’s a bad feminist because she is using her sexuality to manipulate men. But it is all about female empowerment. She is the one driving the sports car in the high-speed chase. She is the one with the gun, shooting the bad boys. She is calling the one in control, doing what men have done for centuries. That, for me, is equality.”
One striking feature of Alvie, as she plays cuckoo in Beth’s nest, is her utter disinterest in her sister’s infant son. “Alvie only wants the baby because it
‘I do hope I win the Bad Sex Prize. One scene is meant to be really bad sex’
‘The relationship between sisters is often nasty, violent and toxic’
is Beth’s. He is an accessory,” Esposito agrees. “She has no maternal love.”
It’s a hard thing for one woman to say about another, even if she is character in a book. “But I wanted to break the taboo,” Esposito replies fiercely. “I’m a mother. I’m absolutely obsessed with my daughter, but this is a story. And there are women out there who regret having children but don’t feel able to speak out. They suffer in silence.”
She resolutely refuses to be tempted into picking suitable actresses for the part of Alvie in the forthcoming film, though her eyes do light up a little when I float the name of Kristen Stewart. Throughout, she has been talking about Alvie as if she is a friend, someone she knows. Some readers will inevitably wonder, with such a strongly-drawn character, if Esposito isn’t also sharing part of herself. She shakes her head vigorously.
“Everyone has a shadow side, their subconscious desires, but this is, I promise you, just me letting my imagination run wild. In real life, I’m a good girl. Mad is complete escapism.”
Mad, by Chloé Esposito, is published by Michael Joseph on June 15 (£12.99). To order your copy for £10.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books. telegraph.co.uk