"Everybody saw her. Your eye went right to her. If the rest of the world was silver, Daisy was gold."
"I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else's muse. I am not a muse. I am the somebody. End of fucking story."
Using an oral history-style format, "Daisy Jones and The Six" is an absorbing tale of a burgeoning rock 'n' roll band in the 1970s. Taylor Jenkins Reid made the decision to tell the story from the standpoint of a mostly dispassionate interviewer who gives the various band members the space to offer alternate perspectives of the band's rise and fall.
Describing the many magical elements required to construct a band capable of expressing universal truths, Reid explores all the variables beyond music that go into, well, music.
"But back then I thought music was just about music. But music is never about music. If it was, we'd be writing songs about guitars. But we don't. We write songs about women."
There is a twist with that dispassionate interviewer, one that lends a level of poignancy to the discussions of addiction, abuse, and neglect.
"You have these lines you won't cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won't instantly come to an end. You've taken a big, black, bold line and you've made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think."
While the band members and surrounding cast often speak in unlikely, Aaron Sorkin-ish soliloquies, the format allows for surprising emotion to seep in. Unrequited love, self-destructive tendencies, and long-held secrets are shared in aching remembrances, allowing Reid to strike just the right chord in this unique novel.
"Dancing barefoot in the snow
Cold can't touch her, high or low
She's blues dressed up like rock 'n' roll
Untouchable, she'll never fold"
