The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins
by Dean Jensen
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dean JensenEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-09-01
ISBN: 1580087582
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Book Reviews of The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton: A True Story of Conjoined Twins
Book Review: How the other half lived
Summary: 4 Stars
According to taste, Dean Jensen's "Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton" can be read as tragedy or triumph. After being on display almost all their lives, the Siamese twins at the end lived in quiet obscurity, clerking in a grocery. All their lives they had said that was how they wanted to finish.
However, they had also wanted husbands and children, and they never got those.
Unlike most Siamese twins, who have to deal with an array of deficits and health problems, Daisy and Violet Hilton were normal in every other way. Not just normal but, as we'd say today, gifted and talented.
More remarkable than the link of flesh at the base of their spines was their sunny disposition, maintained somehow despite an infancy and childhood that was extremely restricted by a stepmother who didn't want anyone to see them for free.
Their charm was their salvation. Although they were wickedly exploited, over their lives they repeatedly attracted devoted friends who rescued them time and again. These never were able to rescue the twins entirely from the exploiters, or from their own sad inability to judge boyfriends, but they kept the Hiltons from utter degradation.
Jensen interprets their lives as an endless search for love, which he -- and they -- interpreted as romantic, sexual love. That escaped them, but they did enjoy and attract affectionate love, which, it may be, they were always too distracted to quite recognize.
Jensen tells the story at a glacial pace but with plenty of detail. He rescues an amazing story. In the `20s, the Hilton Sisters were as celebrated -- and, briefly, as highly paid -- any of the characters of that wacky decade. Somehow they failed to make it into the popular histories along with such comparatively dull stars as Shipwreck Kelly.
The Hiltons' story is a gold mine of irony, but Jensen is not an ironist. By a odd accident, the women ended up in the same place, North Carolina, where the first famous set of Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, had enjoyed the kind of life the sisters had longed for: surrounded by children in rural domesticity. Jensen fails to make the connection.
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