Daisy Jones & The Six

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Karen: That’s the glory of being a man. An ugly face isn’t the end of you.

Teddy said, “Daisy, someone who insists on the perfect conditions to make art isn’t an artist. They’re an asshole.”

I gave her permission to sound bad. Think of how you sing when you’re singing to the radio at full volume. When you can’t hear yourself, you’re not afraid to really belt it out because you won’t have to cringe when your voice breaks or you veer off-key. Daisy needed that kind of freedom. That takes a crapload of confidence. And Daisy didn’t actually have confidence. She was always good. Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

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’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. I had hurt Camila. 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, 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. Camila and I promised to put our marriage first. To put our family first. And we promised to trust each other in how best to do that. 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.

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.

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.

Handsome men that tell you what you want to hear are almost always liars.

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.

You know how sometimes you can tell that something is off with somebody? But you can’t put your finger on it? And you ask what’s wrong and they seem to have no idea what you’re talking about? You feel crazy. You feel like you’re going crazy. This feeling in your gut that the person you love isn’t okay. But they look okay. They look okay.

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.

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.

It’s not my place to say what happened that day. 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.

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

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.

I’m not sure the world deserved her. I mean, don’t get me wrong. She was very pushy and around the mid-nineties she developed a really terrible taste in music, which, for a musician, is awfully hard to look past. And she made the world’s worst chili and she thought it was great and she’d make it all the time. [Laughs] I’m not saying anything you don’t know. But she had serious faults, too. She was stubborn to the point where she stopped talking to your grandma for a few years. But that stubbornness also really paid off a lot of the time. She was stubborn about me. And I’m the man I am because of it.

Your life isn’t about me, honey, my life is about you.