I used to care when men called me difficult. I really did. Then I stopped. This way is better.

Art doesn’t owe anything to anyone.
Songs are about how it felt, not the facts. Self-expression is about what it feels to live, not whether you had the right to claim any emotion at any time. Did I have a right to be mad at him? Did he do anything wrong? Who cares! Who cares? I hurt. So I wrote about it.
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity. And when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.
― Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

Daisy Jones & The Six walks us through the rise and fall of the group from its inception as a party band in Pittsburgh in the late sixties to its sudden dissolution following a sold-out performance in Chicago a decade later.

Through an oral history, a la Variety or Rolling Stone, each band member shares their memories of how it all came together and what they were dealing with as they toured, wrote, fought, and fell in love over the years.

Daisy Jones was a rich, neglected teen living in LA. The only child of famous parents, Daisy starts going out as soon as she learns she can get into nearly any club in LA by eschewing a bra and acting older than her fourteen years. By the time she meets The Six, she has been a part of the LA party scene for years and floats through life in a haze of drugs and alcohol. From the beginning, she is painted as a tragic figure who is too beautiful and too magnetic to actually slip away unnoticed. In addition to being gorgeous, she is talented. After having her ideas stolen by ex-lovers, Daisy decides that if anyone is going to be famous as a result of her influence, it is going to be her. With her raspy, soulful vocal style and her little book of lyrics, she takes to live music as naturally as she does everything else.

Billy and Graham Dunne are the two leaders of The Six, a rock band gaining traction in the LA music scene. After their producer basically forces them to collaborate on a duet with another singer on the same label, Billy grudgingly agrees to work with Daisy as his singing partner. Billy resents sacrificing control and sharing the spotlight, and Daisy resents Billy’s cold reception. However, as their producer predicted, the combination of the two leads to the band’s highest-charting song to date. After some political maneuvering and some ultimatums, Daisy joins as a featured player and Daisy Jones & The Six is born.

I was blown away by this book. Not only is it good, but it is made up of a little bit of everything I love: the “difficult” woman, the clashing egos, the creative process, California rock and roll in the seventies, the doomed love stories, the tales of excess and rock bottom. Anyone who has ever binged “Behind the Music” (RIP) or devoured Fleetwood Mac’s discography and history like I have will probably get something out of this book.

I was going to wait to review this as I like to take a few days after finishing a book to let my excitement, or loathing, subside a little. However, I just started watching the TV show and I’m concerned I’ll get the show and the book mixed up in my mind. The show makes some notable changes, the main one being that Daisy in the book comes across as an asshole with a capital A. The show makes her more “relatable,” which is the first indicator that I will not be as enthralled by the show as the book.

This is my first Taylor Jenkins Reid book and I plan to dive headfirst into Malibu Rising as soon as I can get my hands on it.

The storytelling style bothers some readers and I completely understand why. However, I can dedicate hours to skimming through interviews just like the ones mimicked in this book. With all of the recent pop culture love letters to the eighties, I’m happy to spend some time in the southern California sunshine, the smells of Coppertone and chlorinated pool water, and ocean breeze while Led Zeppelin and The Eagles, Heart and all of the other idols of my childhood play on the car stereo as we hurtle down the freeway with our leaded gasoline, open windows, second hand smoke from Camel Lights, and seatbelt-free summer memories. I often think it’s a miracle that any of us survived to adulthood with all of our limbs still intact. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, but the decade of my birth has always held a fascination for me, and nearly all of it stems from my parents’ much-beloved collection of rock LPs from that era.

Content warnings for substance abuse, parental neglect, and domestic abuse.