Work Text:
Thoughts: The narrator is third-person here, because I wanted the scene with Damon and Karen—I wanted to have Karen say her first memory of Daisy was one of fear, and for Damon to think he’s finally going to learn how Daisy faked this family, and then for him to realize it actually doesn’t help him at all. Otherwise, it wasn’t really supposed to be any different than a story told from Daisy’s perspective—so I was surprised, when I was reading it again, to realize that it did kind of sound like Daisy was manipulating his emotions. I think the suspicion really kicks in when she touches him after explaining why she PhotoShopped the pictures—getting physically closer to him, with unnatural maturity and patience, the way no normal person would at a time like this. It starts to give the sense that she’s manipulating him into doubting himself, maybe even that she needs to touch him to do it, and thus she can afford to be tolerant. That’s not the idea I was trying to convey and in fact I don’t think Daisy ever manipulates Damon’s emotions (unless there’s some kind of extreme situation)—so at first I thought it wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, or that I would have to rewrite parts.
But then I decided that I kind of like the ambiguity here, especially when Damon embraces it at the end. Usually in their stories, he’s the one doing something bad and she’s correcting him or at least accepting it; but here you get the impression that Daisy also does bad things, and maybe that’s why she and Damon are so good together. And that is exactly the idea that I want to convey about them as a whole—that while Damon’s bad deeds are flashy and obvious, Daisy’s are subtle and potentially much worse. He compels her mom and grandma to tell him about her childhood, because he thinks she’s lying about it—not very nice. But—just maybe—Daisy is manipulating the emotions of the man she claims to care about, to make him seem to care about her more, to overlook the inconsistencies in her story, to not be angry at her when he should be. And—if that were true—I think that’s much, much worse than what he did. (Of course, it’s not true, but it’s exactly what she does to other people, so it’s not far off.)
And to be even more philosophical, I like that it’s never clear when Daisy is using some supernatural ability, and when she’s just acting the way an observant, insightful, but otherwise normal, person would. It’s hardly profound to say that significant others influence each other—a man discovering that he really would rather stay in with his girlfriend than go out with his buddies one night, or that he feels bad about doing something that hurts her, is a cliché of the “that’s when I realized I loved her” moment. Only in this case, we throw in the idea that there may be a supernatural level of influence involved—we don’t really know that Daisy can do that, but we know that Damon can, and has done so in the context of a relationship (with Caroline), so naturally that’s what he thinks of first, not that he might, in fact, ‘just like’ her, as Daisy suggests. But Damon being Damon, he’s not judgmental for long; he accepts the possibility of it the way Daisy accepts the bad things she knows he does, and even turns it back on her with that ‘you’ll never know if it’s real or not’ thing—which I think he means jokingly, but as always with Damon, there’s a sting in it. If she’s manipulating him, then that’s a consequence she’ll have to live with—he knows it, she knows it, and they both know the other knows.
My idea, by the way, is that Daisy did in fact plant those memories in her “mom’s” brain, just as Damon accuses (and the pictures have been PhotoShopped to reflect this)—because that’s not her biological mom by any means, it’s just a woman she’s decided to bend to her purposes as a societal cover and source of emotional sustenance. At first I tried to imagine her coming up with every single memory, and that just seemed too monumental a task; so then I thought, maybe she just plants a few “kernels,” and lets people fill in the gaps the way they want to, the way most people do with things that are confusing or don’t make sense. Karen is particularly susceptible to this due to her personality and drinking habit—she’s used to being confused about what’s going on, so she just “goes with the flow.” This trait probably made her particularly attractive to Daisy. But this is why Daisy is “pleasantly surprised” when Damon reveals the level of detail in Karen’s “memories,” because she didn’t plant her entire life story in the woman’s head, just small pieces that Karen has nurtured into a complete picture over time—Daisy’s kernels were a success.
10/24/10: Just reread and I really like it. I feel like it gets the points across without too much fuss—it doesn’t feel either overdone or thin. This time I didn’t get the sense that Daisy might be manipulating him—this time it felt more like Damon was trying hard to unravel her little game, but every time he makes a move, he discovers that she’s playing at a higher level than he thought. And really, this intrigues him and makes him want to learn more. He can’t leave that mystery unexplored.
I like this part: “Daisy wrapped an arm around Damon’s, which somehow made him feel like he’d lost, lost so badly that she wasn’t even mad at him. He clung to the image of her pursed lips and icy tone earlier—he’d riled her then, so there must be something to his idea.” The first part is funny, in that kind of gentle girl-vs.-boy way, but then the second sentence reminds us that he is on to something, and he hasn’t been distracted away from it entirely. I think it really suggests that the real explanation is not what Daisy has told him (or at least not entirely), that Damon really is right. But he has no idea what being right means, especially since she won’t even confirm it.
5/2/11 Read again. I really like this one. It’s fairly simple and spare, and yet in just a few words it conveys a lot about both Damon and Daisy—their individual characters and their relationship. I love how Daisy so skillfully turns Damon’s plan against him, so skillfully that he doesn’t actually get mad that it’s ruined but rather appreciates her abilities, whatever they are, all the more. And I like how he knows how to manipulate her, too—not as cleverly as she can manipulate others (so he imagines), but he knows how to play “to the side of her that liked to be order to his chaos.”