Hello!
Happy Friday. My head is buzzing with all the assignments and deadlines I have to meet, but I was inspired to write this specific blog post ever since I finished Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I also just finished The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, another one of Reid’s incredibly praised novels, and I’ve been putting the pieces together on why her books are so hyped and beloved.
Here is what I’ve realized:
The Concept: People Love Reading Books on Other People’s Lives
Call it humankind’s natural curiosity or noisiness, but you cannot deny the fact that people love to know what is going on in other people’s lives – even people they do not know. For example, celebrities. Rarely does the average person know a celebrity, yet we are obsessed with knowing where our favourite celebrity lives, what there cat’s name is, and who they are dating.
Enter, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books. Specifically, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six.
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – A Snapshot:
Evelyn Hugo was the “it-girl” from the 50s-80s; an actress caught up in drama and scandals, and seven marriages to seven different men. Yet, the fine details of her life remain a mystery to the public.
Monique Grant is a low-level reporter working for her big break which comes unexpectedly when Evelyn Hugo asks Monique to be the one who reveals her life story, something no one has had the opportunity to do before. Confused but curious, Monique meets Evelyn and a story of friendship, love, and hardship is revealed. The truth of Evelyn’s life is also woven in and both Evelyn and Monique find themselves having to face it in different ways.
Analysis:
Evelyn Hugo is not a real person, yet this summary of the book makes me want to know about her life…even though the events that take place never actually happened. But people like her have existed. Like Marilyn Munroe, Judy Gardner, and many more who had crazy and tragic lives that the public still gobbles up to this day.
Reid did reveal that this book was based on Elizabeth Taylor and her life: one of many dramas and many husbands, as well as her interactions with a reporter too.
The key points with these books are not only is the reader getting a look at this “famous” person’s wild and mysterious life but that they are getting an inside scoop to that person’s relationships. The public loves to know who dated who and for how long and why they broke up. Including this into a book satisfies that knowledge craves most of us have if not all of us. Before I even got 10 pages into this book, I knew that Monique’s first question was going to be who was Evelyn Hugo’s greatest love?
Daisy Jones and the Six- A Snapshot:
Written in an interview format, Daisy Jones and the Six follows the iconic band from the 70s with the same name. Decades after the band split up after their first show as this beloved group, the members have come together to recount their rise to success. Addicting and heart-wrenching, this book covers the edgy and dangerous life led during the 70s in Los Angeles and the relationships that formed between the bandmates. Daisy Jones and the Six is an excellent representation of the saying that “nothing is ever as it seems”.
Analysis:
Whenever I listen to a new artist or band, I always dive straight into their personal lives and histories. I can’t help it. Most artists and bands have an incredibly interesting past that led them to stardom and life while they lived through it. Daisy Jones and the Six is a fictional band, but Reid wrote them in such a way that I had to remind myself that they never actually existed. This could be because they had to have been based on bands from around the same time period because the events and drama that happens in Daisy Jones and the Six were not uncommon in bands then.
The anticipation to uncover the band’s secrets (and this is also evident in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo) was something incredibly well done on Reid’s part. We got a bit of talking from one band member who started to relay a secret before quickly moving onto the next one and learning something about them. This was not in a way that made anything feel drawn out either. Yes, I was anxious to figure out something about one character, but I was just as anxious to discover something about another. Except, Eddie. I could not care for Eddie any less.
The fact that you had to read the entire book (which should be the case for most books too) to fully understand everything from everyone’s lives was fascinating. I loved finishing the book and being able to see how this person’s relationship affected everyone else and their life. For example, the effect of Daisy and Billy’s relationship with Camilla. Speaking of Camilla, another thing Reid does amazingly is to write characters that feel like real people. Camilla leaped off the page just as Daisy, Billy, Graham, etc, etc. Everyone was riddled with flaws and we saw those grow and shrink throughout the mesmerizing story.
That’s how I would describe these two books in all honesty, mesmerizing. I can never put them down when I start them.
That is my analysis of why Taylor Jenkins Reid’s books are so addicting; talking about the undeniable curiosity in humans that her stories feed into. I hope you found this post interesting, and if you have any comments to add then please do!
Also, don’t forget to check out my last blog post as well as my social media accounts linked down below. Thanks for reading 🙂
In grade seven, my teacher let us read Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. At this point, I had read it a million and one times, but I was still so excited that entire month or so we spent on the book and lots of my peers were too. We did fun, colourful projects and assignments, even Jeopardy at the end of the unit, that got everyone interacting and pumped about the book. The energy surrounding reading was bright and bubbly in response to the bland and heavy one reading in class usually brings along. That was the first and last time I ever felt that energy in a classroom when it came to reading!
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