Sometimes, the adaption is better than the book, while other times, they’re so different, you can’t even compare the two. We don’t yet know which category Taylor Jenkins Reid‘s Daisy Jones & The Six will fall in, but this is a book worth reading before watching Amazon’s adaptation starring Riley Keough.
For starters, I didn’t know what I was going into when I picked up the novel, prepping myself for the TV series, and I generally don’t dive into something blind without recommendations from someone who knows my taste. It might be my fault for listening to the audiobook before picking up a physical copy of the novel because I generally go in that direction for celebrity memoirs or biographies, making it feel like a podcast episode. But right from the start, Reid grips you, effortlessly throwing you into a world where you have to keep reminding yourself to calm down because it’s fiction. It’s not real.
And with Daisy Jones & The Six, especially, at times, it felt like we shouldn’t even be listening in on these stories—like the secrets pouring out weren’t meant to be heard by people. Still, that’s part of the beauty in writing, and Reid’s stylistic choice with this novel is indescribable.
Basically, this article is trying to say that not only should you read the book, but you should also listen to the audiobook, which involves a different narrator for every character, making it feel like the documentary it’s supposed to be. Daisy Jones & The Six centers around the titular character while effortlessly showcasing how the people around her anchor her charm like a lodestone for love. This novel isn’t a romance by any means, but it’s an intricate love story, tethering darkness and despair to the art of finding a middle ground where understanding transpires.
How Taylor Jenkins Reid frames the beginning and the end is so fascinating that without giving too much away, it’s imperative to understand the importance of a narrator. And as someone with a Master’s in English Literature, Reid makes it so effortless to escape into this novel that when I stopped to think about the narrator, I nearly cried while cucumber and chive cream cheese sandwiches. It allows the reader to see the importance of human beings cultivating an intimate understanding of what’s happening by enabling people to carefully share their parts of the story without jumping to conclusions first.
Daisy Jones & The Six is one of the most intimate stories I’ve ever read because how the novel takes readers through closed corridors is achingly unnerving yet wholly touching. Once you’re in and the lights are dimmed around you, but the conversations are taking place, it feels like there might never be progress, allowing the entangled bits to become a part of your story even if they don’t even come close to your own experiences. It’s a novel that requires looking beyond the words and towards the intentions, choosing right from the start to understand what went wrong and why. But the most notable part is that Reid isn’t on the nose despite the detail that the process treks through a relatively linear interview while recalling past events. It’s transcendent in how the simplicity evokes something otherworldly, harnessing human desperation that we’ve all likely felt at some point in our lives.
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The reason it’s necessary to read the novel, despite how well the adaptation might be, is because it’s indescribable. It’s not an epistolary novel, it’s not narrative-driven, it’s not trying to be unique for the sake of subverting expectations, but rather it’s doing something purposely engaging to bring to light events and people that have an impact. People who might be fictional yet feel like they’re a part of us because the story that’s told ultimately orbits around the desire to be seen as we truly are.
I absolutely adored the book 🤌