Thinking about someone scripting her life as a melodrama & accusing me of being melodramatic for pointing it out. If it weren't so sad, the irony would be quite delicious, can't help but find it a bit amusing regardless.

Melodrama has been a problematic genre for me for a long time, find it hard to get inside of it. Suppose one might see it as a degenerate form of psychological realism, using broad strokes. More inclined to see it the other way around, with psychological realism being a form of melodrama that fetishizes subtlety. Tend to come at it from the other side, expressionism, the gothic, etc. Understand it well enough, I think, can't interpret it with a straight face, seems a requirement.

Feel a bit guilty about it, especially seeing how easily I slip into the other dominant form of popular narrative of the industrial era, the adventure story, the structure of that has always seemed to me deeply in contact with reality, "...and then...and then...and then..." Some sort of sexism, no doubt. Oh fuck, 'Along Came Jones', boy, are the Coasters brilliant.

Going to find my Coasters' Greatest Hits, put it on, get on with boiling potatoes.