Wife has a friend who is generally a good egg, but can’t go too long without taking offense at slights real and (mostly) imagined. The friend also has an unfortunate habit of saying inappropriate things and then acting bewildered when someone else takes offense.
We all know the type: the friend or family member whose idea of personal interaction is pissing people off or acting aggrieved. Or, more crudely, a drama queen, a "frienemy," a shit disturber, or, as I like to say, "borderline sociopath." If you’re over the age of 30, you’ve probably had at least one of these acquaintances, and if you’re over the age of 35, you’ve probably figured out to ditch the nutjob.
The shit disturber in question has pushed Wife’s buttons just a little too hard this time, and, instead of apologizing for an imagined offense, Wife just ignored it.
To wit, a recent phone conversation: "[Baby's] pictures make him look introverted — you should get a professional photographer. I mean, really. He’s not smiling at all! He looks so unhappy! What? You find that offensive? Hello? Hello?"
I’ve always wondered about the neurosis involved with such people, who can’t seem to live without drama in their life. I’ve known plenty of drama queens — I even dated one for a long, disturbing year in which the sex was as volcanic as her mental health was unstable — and the thing they seem to have in common is a sense of self-righteousness, of never being wrong. They want to confront you rather than their own shortcomings.
What I also wonder is if drama queens make for good writers. I’ve known a few who seemed to be driven by personal strife rather than distracted by it, and how they ever made for decent prose was beyond me. But some managed, and some of it was very good indeed.
Norman Mailer (bottom) works on his latest novel
(Of course, the vast majority of it was unadulterated drek, the worst of which was when said drama queen would subject us unfortunate readers to his or her personal dramas thinly disguised as fiction. Bleech.)
It’s been my opinion that a stable home, friends and job does artistic creation crave, though you can look at plenty of writers who were drama queens — Norman Mailer picked fist fights, Hemmingway picked fist fights, Irwin Shaw picked fist fights, and we’re just talking about macho-man writers born before World War II.
Not that you want to be these people, obviously.
I’ve had special rules to deal with these types in class ("avoid at all costs"), but it does raise a larger question: are these people — who are so in touch with their dramatic sides that they need to create conflict to feel at ease — better writers than those of us who are preternaturally calm and collected? Or are they simply better models for creating characters?
I mean, think of some of the great characters in literature. Emma Bovary. Michael Henchard. Miss Haversham. Heathcliff. All of them memorable, full of life, borderline psycho. They just can’t help but make everybody else’s life miserable by their dramatics. (And that’s just the 19th Century.)
With friends like these…
I mean, could have Heathcliff actually written a novel without killing someone in the process? You can totally see any one of Austen’s heroines knocking off "Sense and Sensibility" without a sweat. But Raskolnikov would pester all of his friends to read "Crime and Punishment," and offend them when he tries killing them when they refuse.
Perhaps you’re such a person and you’re writing a major work of art. If so, how do you do it without faking a suicide?
The French novelist Stendhal said living a bourgeois life allows us to seek drama in our writing. Wife says, "When it comes to drama, leave it on the page," and that sounds about right to me.
Sugar, I’ve found that the key to dealing with these people is to not feed them. It’s something that took a while for me to learn but it has been an immeasurable resource for me lately;-)
I’m a drama queen and I say this only after years of denial. As a child I was prone to making things up : scenarios, fights, imagined dialogues, gossip, which surprised friends and family. They didn’t consider it creative, as they do now. At the time they wondered why I felt the need to lie and exaggerate. But how to explain all the stuff going on in my head? So many characters, so many questions, all that anxiety -it was hard to deal with imaginary versus reality - especially when it came with a rush of energy. Years later, I’m more or less a balanced and happy person; except I still have my occasional ‘too calm, must create chaos’ moments, which I put into writing - very therapeutical. I guess what I’m saying is that in a lot of cases there is no way to divorce yourself from high drama, if this is your natural way of being. All you can hope is to put that drive into a productive useful place where it doesn’t harm others. Allowed to roam free, pent-up energy can turn destructive very quickly. Having a good outlet helps and writing holds plenty of opportunities for DQs.
Oh wow, I was going to write how I condemn all of those DQs and how useless the expenditure of energy is in fighting them but then I read kallioppe’s post above: “too calm, must create chaos” and a little bell went off in my head. Omg, that’s me! What a startling realization on a Friday morning…for me, things are “too calm” when I’ve just finished a draft of something and handed it off to a reader. I don’t know if my desire to create chaos actually helps me develop new ideas or merely keeps me occupied until I have to rewrite.
I used to regularly hold an Asshole Yard Sale, which is basically where I shuttled of my sociopath-hanger-ons on to other friends. I haven’t had to do that in about eight years, so I finally have a good, small circle of friends who are sane.
my vote is for the neurosis
Technically, borderlines and sociopaths are at two opposite ends of the pain-in-the-ass spectrum. Drama Queens might or might not be borderlines, but either way they tend to have no insight into their own behavior, are not malicious, and simply have no idea what harm their impulsive blather wreaks. Sociopaths, on the other hand, are the more interesting and sinister of the two, those we are very unlikely to have as friends in the first place. They tend to be quiet, rather than dramatic. They tend to experience no emotional arousal, compared to the constant arousal of borderlines. They manipulate and murder for thrills. I did have one friend with a sociopath boyfriend. He used her bank card to empty her account and the key to my apartment I left with her to rob me. A borderline is a great friend compared to that. Give me Paris any day.
Anyone who says that a baby looks “introverted” should be covered in molasses and airdropped onto the plains of Mongolia. Not that I have an opinion about any of this.