Daisy Jones & The Six: recommend!
I think it’s really tough for me to choose a favourite book because I don’t order books, or re-read books much. But I have books I really like at times, and in those fleeting moments, these books are everything.
This book — literally written in interview format, where each character (a rock n’ roll band member from the band ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ in the 70s) accounts for their lens of a series of escalating events —is one I literally couldn’t put down. I’m so in love with how Taylor Jenkins Reid writes, and she builds tension, all kinds of tension, as people fall in love with music, and narrate their own lives through it — there’s a charged atmosphere that just doesn’t collapse. So much heated intensity, allure, and sensuality is conveyed through each little interview snippet, and human psychology is just so complex when everyone is striving for something or someone, together as a band, but also for themselves each to their own.
I recognize that most of the times a lot of music is just sound to fill the space and serves its purpose as a laidback, mellow, versatile thing that brings people together onto a shared familiar mood and lends soundbites to act as fillers for gaps of silence. But I love wordplay, words, and just poetry. And sometimes, I do wonder, about the exaggerated emotions artists put forth into their music. How much of these lyrics are life, and how much a performance. Art mimics life and (my) life also mimics art (through the music I listen to).
Regardless, Daisy Jones and the Six is a band that comes together, and roars into fame in the 70s. A band sounds like a simple unit, but within the band, there are hierarchies, power structures, love and lust (hidden or in broad daylight), serious addictions and fuck-ups, conflicts of publicity. It’s just a stockpot of emotions, and the band’s job was to also put these emotions into music, into broad daylight, and blow them up.
From the interviews:
Daisy Jones: Back then, I had an oversized sense of self-importance and absolutely no self-worth. It didn’t matter how gorgeous I was or how great my voice was or what magazine I was on the cover of. I mean, there were a lot of teenage girls that wanted to grow up and be me in the late seventies. I was keenly aware of that. But the only reason people thought I had everything is because I had all the things you can see.
I had none of the things you can’t.
And a lot of good dope can make it so you can’t tell whether you’re happy or not. It can make you think having people around is the same thing as having friends.
I just thought that to be so direct. How really, truly, self-importance is sooo different from self-worth and an aggrandized versions of yourself can be puff, compared to the intrinsic self-worth you carry with youreself daily. Don’t lots of people have high self-importance and low self-worth?
Graham (also a founding member of the Six): You know, I think a lot of how I defined myself was in relation to him (Billy, Graham’s older brother, the unspoken, recognized leader of the Six). I always felt like Billy Dunne’s little brother. And that was when it occurred to me that he probably never defined himself as Graham Dunne’s older brother. Would never have thought to.
The sibling dynamic between founding band members make sense.
And then the pain and sacrifice of love and marriage. Billy was on the road all the time, and his wife Camilla had to have hope and trust and faith in him, even with him recovering from a period of devastating addiction.
Billy: I know it may seem like maybe [Camilla and I avoided certain conversations about certain women because] it was a lack of trust. That either I didn’t trust her to know what was going on… or that she didn’t trust me enough to have been able to handle that. But it’s really the opposite.
I’m not saying I didn’t care. I cared a lot. I’m saying that when you really love someone, sometimes the things they need may hurt you, and some people are worth hurting for.
I had hurt Camilla. God knows I had. But loving somebody isn’t perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, a gut punch. That’s why it’s a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn’t desreve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else’s. It’s sacred.
And Camilla:
Camilla: I wish Billy didn’t love anyone else. But do you know what I decided a long time ago? I decided I don’t need perfect love and I don’t need a perfect husband and I don’t need perfect kids and a perfect life and all that. I want mine. I want my love, my husband, my kids, my life.
I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be strong. So if you’re waiting around, hoping that something’s going to crack, I just… I have to tell you that it’s not gonna be me. And I can’t let it be Billly.
I think what’s wonderful about Reid’s books is that they’re so well structured, and all of the corners, all of the connections between the characters are so well laid-out. Each connection is so interesting, and characters take up equal room on the stage in their perspectives, making the character development in each of her books rich lifelike and complex. third person omniscient woo!
