Daisy Jones & The Six

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

When someone is out on a ledge like that, especially when you’re the one that coaxed them out there in the first place, you don’t dare do anything to unbalance them.

Her hair was still blond then. Her legs were so short, they didn’t even bend at the knee when she sat, just stuck straight out.

I got a little defensive but Camila never really backed down from too much. She was very good at knowing what everybody else should do and she had no problem telling you. It was really annoying. How right she always was. And she would tell you “I told you so.” You’d do something she told you not to do and it wouldn’t work out and you’d find yourself bristling around her, just waiting for that “I told you so” to come. And she’d always land it right when your defenses were down. CAMILA: If you come to me and ask me for advice, and then you don’t take my advice, and it blows up in your face exactly like I told you it would, what do you expect me to say?

And then Eddie said, “I bet you’d make a great aunt.” You don’t think to tell someone they will be a good aunt if you think they will be a good mom.

DAISY: The songs that we were writing together…[pauses] I started feeling like a lot of what Billy was writing about was how he was actually feeling. It seemed clear to me that there were things unsaid that were being said in our work together. BILLY: They’re songs. You pull them out of wherever you can. You change the meanings to fit the moments sometimes. Some songs came more from my heart than others, I suppose. DAISY: It’s so strange, how someone’s silence, someone’s insistence that something isn’t happening can be so suffocating. But it can be. And suffocating is exactly the word, too. You feel like you can’t breathe.

It’s very vulnerable, being an artist, telling the truth like that, like we’re doing now. When you’re living your life, you’re so inside your head, you’re swirling around in your own pain, that it’s hard to see how obvious it is to the people around you. These songs I was writing felt coded and secret, but I suspect they weren’t coded and secret at all.

But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that. Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror.

She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.

I was caught in a whirl of my own ego. I had this validation I’d been looking for for such a long time. But on the other hand, I was so unsatisfied in so many ways. Back then, I had an oversize 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 knew getting high wasn’t a long-term solution. But God, it’s so easy. It’s just so easy. But of course, it’s not easy at all, either. Because one minute you’re just trying to nurse a wound. And the next, you’re desperately trying to hide the fact that you’re now a jury-rigged, taped-up, shortcutted mess of a person and the wound you were nursing has become an abscess. But I was skinny and pretty so who cared, right?

She was dangerous. And I knew that. But I don’t think I could recognize that the safer she felt to me, the more dangerous she was.

but…it scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it. That really tripped me out, that everyone’s life was that precarious. That there wasn’t some all-knowing mechanism in place that stopped things that shouldn’t happen from happening.

We are talking about probably the first man in my life who really saw me, who ever really understood me, who had so much in common with me…and he still didn’t love me. When you find that rare person who really knows who you are and they still don’t love you… I was burning.

History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing.

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

I’m not saying that 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.

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, it’s 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 deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else’s. It’s sacred. I have no tolerance for people that waste other people’s faith in them. None at all.

Do you know what you do with that level of trust? When someone says, “I trust you so much I can tolerate you having secrets”? You cherish it. You remind yourself how lucky you are to have been given that trust every day. And when you have moments when you think, I want to do something that would break that trust, whatever that is—loving a woman you shouldn’t be loving, drinking a beer you shouldn’t be drinking—do you know what you do? You get your ass up onto your two feet, and you take your kids to Disneyland with their mother.

If I’ve given the impression that trust is easy—with your spouse, with your kids, with anybody you care about—if I’ve made it seem like it’s easy to do…then I’ve misspoken. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But you have nothing without it. Nothing meaningful at all. That’s why I chose to do it. Over and over and over. Even when it bit me in the ass. And I will keep choosing it until the day I die.

I could hear this deep sadness in her voice. Which is rare with Daisy if only because she’s usually hopped up on something. Do you realize how sad you have to be to be sad on coke and dexies? I knew, if she knew how often I was thinking about her, she wouldn’t feel lonely.

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. Women will crush you, you know? I suppose everybody hurts everybody, but women always seem to get back up, you ever notice that? Women are always still standing.

When you write a song that may or may not be about someone, you can be pretty sure they aren’t going to ask. Because no one wants to sound like a jerk who thinks everything is about them.

was so angry it was like I surpassed hot and went cold. Just frozen there, stunned. I could feel the blood drain out of me, like someone pulled the stop on a tub.

It seemed like there wasn’t anything about me, any truth that I could tell him, that he wouldn’t accept. Acceptance is a powerful drug. And I should know because I’ve done ’em all.

You have to have one person in your life that you know would never do anything to steer you wrong. They may disagree with you. They could even break your heart, from time to time. But you have to have one person, at least, who you know will always tell you the truth. You need one person who, when the shit hits the fan, grabs your stuff, throws it in a suitcase, and gets you away from the Italian prince.

They say the first year of marriage is the hardest and I really took that to heart back then. I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to…I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace. And you know what? Even if I did know that, I don’t know that I would have been ready to welcome it or value it.

You know, one of the things you learn in recovery is that self-control is the only control we have. That all you can do is make sure your own actions are sound because you can’t control the actions of others.

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.

Some people will never stop being themselves. And you think it drives you crazy but it is the very thing you will think about when they are gone. When you don’t have them in your life anymore.

Passion is…it’s fire. And fire is great, man. But we’re made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive. My family was my water. I picked water. I’ll pick water every time. And I wanted Daisy to find her water. Because I couldn’t be it.

No matter who you choose to go down the road with, you’re gonna get hurt. That’s just the nature of caring about someone. No matter who you love, they will break your heart along the way.

I couldn’t handle reality. Not sober. Not without a drink or a…I just checked out. I checked out of my life. I had no other way of coping but to die inside. Because if I tried to stay alive, to live during that period of time, it might actually have killed me.

You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything.

You think that tragedy means that the world is over but you realize the world is never over. It’s just never over. Nothing will end it.

You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind.

But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it’s more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you’ll have to watch.

“A part of me wishes you wanted kids, because my kids make me so happy. But…I think in order to be happy like I’m happy, you need different things. And I want you to have whatever those things are.” And I started crying, then. Because somebody understood.

Knowing you did the right thing doesn’t mean you’re happy about

All I will say is that you show up for your friends on their hardest days. And you hold their hand through the roughest parts. Life is about who is holding your hand and, I think, whose hand you commit to holding.

I can’t think of any two things that make you quite as self-absorbed as addiction and heartbreak. I had a selfish heart. I didn’t care about anyone or anything but my own pain. My own need. My own aching. I’d have made anyone hurt if it could have taken some of mine away. It’s just how sick I was.

People say it’s hard to be away from the people you love but it was so hard to be right next to him.

Sometimes I wonder, if I was Graham, maybe I would have wanted a baby, too. If I knew someone else would raise it, someone else would let go of their own dreams, someone else would sacrifice and keep everything together while I went and did what I wanted and came back on weekends…maybe then I might want a baby, too.

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

“Don’t count yourself out this early, Daisy. You’re all sorts of things you don’t even know yet.” That really stuck with me. That who I was wasn’t entirely already determined. That there was still hope for me.

It’s the ones who never loved you enough that come to you when you can’t sleep. You always wonder what the future might have held and you’ll never know. Maybe you almost don’t want to know.