Daisy Jones & The Six - Taylor Jenkins Reid Page 0,112

If he had had it his way, I’d’ve conformed to what everybody else did, to what everybody else wanted for their lives. But it wasn’t what I wanted.

Maybe if I was of the younger generation, marriage would have been more attractive to me. I see the way a lot of younger marriages are, these days, truly egalitarian, nobody serving anybody else. But that wasn’t the mold I saw. That wasn’t a mold most us even had back then. What I wanted didn’t fit in with having a husband. I wanted to be a rock star. And then I wanted to live alone. In a house in the mountains. And that’s what I’ve done.

But if you get to be my age and you can’t look back at your life and wonder about some of your choices … well, you have no imagination.

Billy: I packed it all in, signed a publishing deal with Runner Records and I’ve been writing songs for pop singers since ‘eighty-one. It’s a good life. It’s been quiet and stable even though I spent the eighties and nineties in a noisy house with three screaming girls and a great woman.

Somebody said the other day that I gave up my career for my family. And I suppose I did, though I think that makes it sound like it was more noble than it was. It was just a man hitting his limit. Not sure how much nobility there really is in that. It’s more that I knew that if I was going to hit that bar Camila had set for me, I had to walk away from that band.

Do you understand why I loved your mother the way I did?

She was an incredible woman. She was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Give me all the platinum albums you want, all the drugs and all the Cuervo and all the fun times and the successes and the fame and all of it, I would hand them all back to you, just as the cost of my memories with her. She was an absolutely incredible, incredible woman. And I didn’t deserve her.

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.

When she was diagnosed with lupus, I think we were all set back. And I wouldn’t wish that disease on anybody. But I was determined to take it as an opportunity to give back to your mother. I could take over when she was too tired, when her body ached too much. I could be home to raise you girls so it didn’t fall on her to do everything. I could be her partner and be by her side through it all.

We bought the house in North Carolina … I guess it’s about twenty years ago now. After you and your sisters were all off at college. We scoured the coastline, looking for exactly the house she had seen in her dreams. We didn’t find it so we built it. There’s no honeycomb there. It’s not exactly the one in the song. It’s just a two-story ranch with acres of land and a bay she liked to go crabbing in. But it was the home she’d always wanted. I feel so lucky to have been the man to do that for her.

I know you know how hard it was to lose her. We’re all still reeling from it.

I admit I’m feeling lonelier than lonely these days, with you and your sisters spread out all over the country and your mom gone. It’s been over five years now. She wasn’t supposed to go that early. Taking a woman like that, at sixty-three, seems cruel even for a vengeful God. But it’s the hand she was dealt—the hand we’ve all been dealt. So I’m playing it.

You know, I didn’t talk to you very much about all of this when you were growing up. Never