(courtesy Text Publishing)
Life, so youthful expectation dreamily romanticises, is supposed to fall into all kinds of predictable (and, of course, satisfyingly successful) places.
But as we all soon discover, some more than others, life is not to be dictated to, benignly and excitedly or otherwise, and so what often happens is that all the expectations have long nurtured and almost willed into beginning, don’t quite play out as desired.
It is not even remotely an easy lesson to learn, something that newly-arrived-in-Melbourne university student Brooke, the hugely likeable protagonist of Nina Kenwood’s Unnecessary Drama, unwillingly discovers when she turns up ready for the next stage of her naturally reinvented life to find out that one of her two housemates is someone she hoped never to see again – her friend-turned-enemy from high school Jesse.
What is supposed to be a glorious period of transformative change, and it is, just not how Brooke envisaged it would be, instead becomes a rollercoaster of scarily unpredictable ups-and-downs, not easy for anyone to navigate having barely emerged from high school, but harder still to navigate when your life is ruled by an anxiety over everything and an over-reliance on apps, lists and the strict observance of rules.
Brooke loves all three of these things, confident that if her world is buttressed by the knowable that she can weather all the unknowable things that come her way and respond in a way that, while it may not be exciting, is safe, and safe is what Brooke loves more than anything.
‘I know we’re supposed to ignore each other when no one else is around,’ he [Jesse] says. ‘But I have to tell you —-‘
My [Brooke] heart catches, just for a second, as I wait for him to finish his sentence. Maybe he’s feeling nostalgic too. Maybe he’s going to try and rekindle our friendship. I brace myself for an emotional confession. To coldly remind him we are not friends and can never be again.
‘That your foot is touching something disgusting,’ he says, pointing at the floor.
Jesse’s presence upends all that spectacularly, and while Brooke soon finds an uneasily sweet accommodation with Jesse who is annoyingly lovely (how dare he!) and solid friendships with endlessly warm and supportive fellow housemate Harper and her equally wonderful girlfriend Penny, she is unnerved to find out that life will not march to her love of rules and order, even if she wills it to be so.
That’s a problem, and yet, despite a blizzard of sage, and humourously imparted life lessons flying her way, Brooke keeps trying to keep everyone and everything in their/its lane, something they resolutely refuse to do.
Jesse, for instance, is supposed, as brokered by Brooke, to only talk to her when they’re in the presence of Harper, and to only do so in generically useful and domestically untroubling ways that don’t even remotely involve any actual friendship or actually meaningful human interaction.
But that doesn’t happen, not necessarily because Jesse is wilfully disobeying the rules, including a host set down by Harper that turn out not to be so hard and fast after all, but because life has a way of seeing your carefully laid markers, your stridently enforced parameters and trampling all over them with seemingly gleeful delight.
Not so good for Brooke who finds her coming-of-age as a Melbourne university student to be way rockier than she thought, but for readers of the superlatively good Unnecessary Drama, who get not only the titular drama thank you very much, but a lot of very funny moments when life rather wonderfully gives Brooke’s stringent expectations a great big finger.
(courtesy Text Publishing)
As Unnecessary Drama continues down its endlessly merry but emotionally meaningful path, peopled by characters who come alive right off the page and dialogue that crackles with comedic fun and some truly sage and heartfelt moments, much of the enjoyment comes from seeing Brooke grappling with the fact that life cares next to nothing about what your expectations are.
It’s almost like that flagrantly wilful Auntie Mame-like figure many of us have had in our lives – love you Auntie Liz, may you and your fabulously oversized, colourful glasses rest in peace – who knows you want things safe and ordered and for plans to be scrupulously observed, because the anxiety is real my friends, and who sets out, for the very best reasons and in the most rewarding of ways, to upend them.
They essentially give you the life experiences you need rather than want, and as Brooke and Jesse, and an ever-widening circle of friends, which ends up including some people Brooke simply didn’t see coming, progress through the delightfully readable pages of Unnecessary Drama, that becomes the only lesson in life to learn.
But Brooke, god bless her, and she is adorable, funny and oh-so-relatable, has a hugely hard time learning them, all of them in ways that usually involve her being fantastically humiliated or humbled, but the isn’t that what growing up seems to be rather inconveniently full of?
But by the time I have stepped onto the street, I’ve lost all my anger and I am deeply embarrassed and I need to escape. I am not a maker of scenes. I hate making scenes. My role is to smooth things over when someone else makes a scene … God. Why do I feel so unhinged. It’s like I’m thirteen again.
Unnecessary Drama then is all about what happens when you leave a relatively safe and predictable high school world and step into the bigger landscape of adult life, and discover that the past won’t stay in the past, the present won’t necessarily march to the drumbeat of your chosen sheet of music, and that all kinds of things are going to happen for which there is no app, rule or list than can adequately contain or deal with it.
And that, my friends, is what makes Unnecessary Drama such a fabulously enjoyable delight to read.
It glories in the unexpected, the previously unknown but insistently present things of life, and demands that you, well Brooke to be fair but you too really, grapple with them because they aren’t going away any time soon, and while like Brooke, you may hate that, perhaps you’ll eventually find it’s not so bad after all.
Certainly as Unnecessary Drama continues its fun and thoughtfully comedic way, it begins to emerge that maybe your expectations were not only unrealistic but also a million miles from what you need and what your heart desires, and that all those impromptu events, an impulsive reactions and resultant life moments were exactly what the existential doctor ordered.
Brooke is heavily resistant to even the faintest idea of that at the beginning, but by the all-too-soon end of Unnecessary Drama she has not braved and lived through complications, vexations and the anxiety stoking hellhole of the routinely unexpected, but also come out the other side and discovered, as we all do, that maybe life not lived the lane you think it will occupy is not so bad after all.