As a teenager, I lived in breathless anticipation or sickening dread of the inevitable drama with a capital D that Monday mornings brought with them. Who had hooked up with whom that weekend (and where and when)? So-and-so called someone a nasty name. Did you hear Sally broke up with her boyfriend … or did her boyfriend break up with her? At an all-girls prep school, drama was the default setting. Now that I’m a young-adult author, drama is my literary milieu; it provides the conflict that makes a plot. But that doesn’t mean I want it in my real life. You expect drama from teenage girls. They’re all self-consciousness and hormones and disdain. But why does it seem some adults never made it out of that overwrought stage of life? There’s the colleague who sends interoffice memos about a shortage of English breakfast tea bags in the break room; a friend who must be talked down from the ledge every time a relationship, no matter how brief or insignificant, ends; a relative who reads your delayed acceptance of his Facebook friend request as a line in the sand. Why are some people addicted to drama? Read more …
