I still hoped it was a phase they’d outgrow, even after Zoe, who is now 20, passed along her extensive collection of Lurlene McDaniel weepers (including “Mother, Help Me Live,” “Sixteen and Dying” and “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”) to Ella, now 18, who in turn gave them to Clementine, 11.

But after my girls moved on to the harder stuff, the oeuvre of Jodi Picoult — full of battered wives, date rapes and exceedingly rare birth defects that portend a life of pain — I had to face the truth.

“We’ve raised trauma junkies,” I said to my husband one day last week, after I walked into the kitchen and found my daughters checking the show times for “My Sister’s Keeper.”

“Is that the one where a mother abandons a baby with AIDS?” my husband asked.

“No, that was a Lurlene McDaniel,” Zoe said.

“That was ‘Baby Alicia is Dying,’ ” I clarified. “In this one, the parents have a baby so they can harvest it for parts.”

I loved books about horrible things happening to people when I was young. In some ways I still do. I think sometimes we can’t let ourselves cry about the things happening in our own lives—we think we don’t deserve to, that our problems aren’t important. So when I read a book about someone else’s tragedy, it really is cathartic.

I think teenagers get told a lot that their problems aren’t important, because adults have been through those problems before and see them as not a big deal. But when you’re going through them for the first time, they feel awful. The first time you get your heart broken, it feels like the end of the world. You don’t know if you’ll survive because you’ve never been through it before.

When I was 19, for some reason, I went through a phase where I cried at everything. Movies, TV shows, books, stories about other people, sad commercials. Other people’s pain seemed so real to me. I think I was becoming an adult, then… I had been through enough pain in my life that I could identify with someone else’s, even though I had never experienced that particular tragedy.

Just some thoughts.