Daisy Jones and the Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo are both enormously popular recent works from novelist Taylor Jenkins Reid, published within the last couple of years. The former was released just this last year to immediate fanfare, quickly climbing best seller lists (with a popularity no doubt bolstered after having been optioned the summer before its publication, for an Amazon miniseries produced by Reese Witherspoon). These novels are award-winners, critical favorites, and both boast Goodreads ratings above a 4.2.
Their overwhelmingly positive receptions and popularity are not the only things these two books have in common, though. In fact, there's something notable about Reid's construction of their narratives that these two bestsellers share.
In terms of plot and theming, there's already plenty of points of comparison. The two female main characters - Daisy and Evelyn - occupy settings that serve as obvious similarities: both of their stories involve attaining success in a major entertainment industry (music and movies, respectively), during a specific cultural zeitgeist (the '70s California rock scene, and '50s Hollywood). Most importantly, both of their stories are told as retrospectives.
In fact, each book's past-gazing narrative is relayed through a deliberately mediated format: for Daisy, it's an oral history of the band's meteoric rise, as told by its members, crew, production, and family, while for Evelyn, it's a long-awaited memoir, detailed firsthand, by an aging screen siren. Instead of orienting the narrative specifically in the perspectives of Daisy and Evelyn, their firsthand accounts are couched within the greater perspectives of those to whom they detail the story, with the band's account transcribed and arranged by a narrator who remains unidentified (until the very end), and Evelyn's story kept mostly intact, by a magazine writer interviewing her.
As it turns out, both of those frameworks were chosen very deliberately, with references made to real nonfiction works. For instance, one of the influences for Evelyn, was revealed by Reid, to be the notable memoir of the legendary actress Ava Gardner, whose candid and catty reflections on her ex-husbands and peers of the big screen, told to journalist Peter Evans, were only published after both of them had passed. Meanwhile, Reid's inspiration for Daisy and the Six's oral history was similarly straightforward: as the author told Rolling Stone earlier this year, "I wanted it to feel like the three-hour 'History of the Eagles' documentary."
Another similarity? Each of their narrators is teased to be linked to both Daisy and Evelyn's accounts, in some capacity, but the connection is only made known in an eleventh hour reveal. To avoid spoilers, I'll try casing it in as rudimentary terms as possible: both are daughters, related to the main narrative by an outer spoke on the wheel of social connection, one not immediately related to either Daisy or Evelyn.
This generational and social circle displacement is tied to the sense of offset connection displayed throughout the text. And to be clear, this sense of distance, is one of the elements of both of these novels, that makes them so successful in telling engrossing, emotional stories.
In this way, Daisy and Evelyn, while given the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words, are not the primary narrators. And yet, both Monique and the band's narrator are still kept separate from these main characters, too, but in the foreground of the story itself: a generation and social connection removed, ties kept secret, but the mouthpieces through which the story is voiced.
And yet, this emphasis of removal and distance, belies and enables a very particular sense of intimacy, truth, and personality. Everything about their narrators and narrative style speaks to mediation - especially in the specifically mediated format of interviews - but the main character perspectives themselves are what draw you in, make you feel like you're privy to some grander truth. It's just that their personal stories, which no other narrator can speak to experiencing, are told through the lens of a different narrator entirely, one whose relationship to them is kept in the dark.
It is this duality that makes Daisy Jones and the Six and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo feel so compelling, like having someone whisper a secret, while still holding you at arm's length. It leaves room in the story structure for interest, big reveals and plot twists, because either the framework or the narrative isn't ready for you to have access to that particular piece of the puzzle.
Without this sense of mediation - if Evelyn was simply published containing only a firsthand account of her story, or if Daisy only illustrated her place in the band through her own eyes - you would miss out on not only the greater perspective on each of these characters, outside their own self-image, but you would lose the capacity for movement, embellishment, reaction, and dynamics in the story, without jeopardizing the integrity of the firsthand sense of truth. But with the imposed framework and structure of mediated storytelling, Reid was able to create these opportunities, for making the story greater than just just one limited view.
As the narrative resolves at the end of each book, so too do those cages disappear, with connections between the narrator, and their respective storytellers, having finally been established clearly. The whole truth is told. The limelight Daisy and Evelyn chased is finally enough to light the whole stage, so you can see the complex context of its major players, and the all of the twists, characters, lies, and intersections, for what they are: a damn good story.
Daisy Jones and the Six allows each character to tell their own story, without losing any of what's hidden behind the dialogue. The novel is told in a really unexpected form of what I'd have to classify as epistolary format: a group interview that spans a catalog of specific, unique characters, in a riff on a band documentary, telling the collective story of fictional '70s California rock outfit, Daisy Jones and the Six. Through their various interviews, all six members of the musical group, plus Daisy, family, friends, production, and assorted backstage members of their various entourages are all given full-fledged personalities, motivations, interpersonal relationships and faults.
One of my favorite elements of the novel was that while the rampant drug and alcohol use was obviously a forefront issue, for the most part, this story didn't have a true blue, cut-in-an-image consistent villain. Daisy might be interpreted as a kind of primary antagonist, as she's the one ruffling the most feathers, and lead singer Billy might be slated in the same role, as his actions and characterization can come off as the most abrasive or detrimental, but neither is working towards any kind of negative goal. They're both absurdly narcissistic and tunnel-minded, and end up creating their own issues, but the villain that emerges more is a lack of a sense of communication, and an unwillingness to listen or empathize... a smart choice for a book that re-mediates a form of communication itself, and calls on its reader to derive emotion from a challenging perspective. (Definitely for fans of movies like Almost Famous or A Star is Born.)
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo - the fictional tell-all of an aging starlet, as told to a young reporter - clips along somewhat benignly, until it hits a major curve, and you think, "Wow, that's a little early for a plot twist." But that's how life is: surprising things happen along the way, but the world keeps turning. It means a lot that the major drive of pacing for SHoEH feels less catalyzed by major character decisions or plot contrivance, but by the gentle gravity of things falling together. As one character remarks of Evelyn's star beauty, it feels "inevitable." Reid does an excellent job of not only making things feel real, but feel that that's really the way things would have worked out, had the story been grounded in reality.
If anything, reality was the biggest problem I had with this book. As with any novel set in a defined space and time, with key cultural and historical factors addressed within its pages, there comes the frustrating act of shoving a new piece into a puzzle that is already completed. Reid does an excellent job generating a world - Hollywood of the second half of the 20th Century, of course - that closely mirrors that which already exists... but this sense of believability made it near impossible to shove in alongside information you already know and have. Besides, there's too much opportunity for comparison: for instance, Evelyn's litany of husbands being clearly influenced by Elizabeth Taylor's, had me constantly mining for clear or tagged in-jokes. While some pieces of the puzzle are obvious - Vivant as a stand-in approximation of Vogue, most readily - it makes the less trackable pop culture twins stick out. Still, I read this book, for the most part, on a camping trip, while huddling in my sleeping bag, desperate not to scratch the mosquito bites that had sprung up along my chest and arm. The fact that I could be trapped in those conditions, and yet still transported to the Hollywood of a long-ago decade, should tell you enough about the success of Reid's world-building.
Have you read any of Taylor Jenkins Reid's works? What do you think about this kind of narrative framework? Can you think of any that ring similar? Let me know, in the comments below!
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