by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’ve decide to make today a reading day, rather than a development and / or writing day, so I’ve just finished Daisy Jones & The Six. And I have opinions to articulate.
First, the novel is an extremely easy read. It’s well written and structured and, yet, most of the time I felt like an interloper in a story whereby a woman is telling other women a story. As a dude,I struggled to understand some basic elements of the story.
First and foremost, I felt the “subverting of expectations” when it came to the relationship between Daisy Jones and Billy Dunn, EXTREMELY IRRITATING. I get that the whole point of the novel, in a sense, is it sees the real-life drama surrounding the production of Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” album as a stepping off point.
Ok, I get it.
And I get that, as such, the author decided to invert what the audience would otherwise expect. Rather than Billy Dunn and Daisy Jones fucking like rabbits, they hate each other because they can’t have each other. Ok, ok, I understand.
But.
Maybe because I’m a smelly boi who doesn’t understand what modern white liberal women want to read, I felt cheated. I felt cheated on a number of different levels.
The use of the “oral history” technique for the story was annoying because it would have been more compelling to, say, open each chapter with a little bit of that and then show the audience what REALLY happened.
I was taken aback by how little sex there was in the novel. Despite a story about sex, drugs and rock n roll, it was very light and breezy and never really challenged or confronted the audience. I don’t know how much that is I’m a smelly boi who wants nasty things to happen to characters and how much of that is that’s just the story the author wanted to tell.
There were long stretches of time during my reading of the novel when I wondered when something was going to happen. I just didn’t feel invested in the characters and everything was written in such a Lifetime Channel manner that I only kept reading because the Amazon Prime show based on the novel WAS that good.
Anyway, I could rant a lot, lot more, but I probably would get canceled.
