Both Uses of

melodrama
in
The Sunlight Dialogues

Craftily, ruefully, squinting up from under his eyebrows at his troubled life, Will Hodge Sr recognized that the cage was there, understood it as one understands that someday one will no doubt die—that one might, if one were a twenty-year-old poet or a fool, make howling melodrama of it, but the fact would remain no more than it was, for all one's howling—an indifferent limit, a wall closing out what a man who had business to attend to had no good reason to be curious about.†
Chpt 3

The subject is a difficult one to treat frankly without appearing to sink into petty fault-finding or name-calling or, worse, melodrama, and, worse yet, cheap expose.†
Chpt 5 *

Definition:

a story or behavior that is overly dramatic