Families are masters of revisionist history. They edit the past to make it palatable.
The classic storyline: someone leaves to find themselves, fails or succeeds, and returns home years later.
If you are building a narrative, these five frameworks are the engines that drive family drama.
In simple stories, loyalty is a virtue. In complex family dramas, loyalty is a cage.
Every family has a skeleton in the closet—a hidden adoption, a criminal past, an affair, or a debt.
Great family drama isn’t just about people arguing at a wedding or a funeral. It’s about the invisible threads of history that tie people together. It is about the gap between who we are and who our family needs us to be .