"'Don't you worry about what's going to happen when you die?' I said, genuinely curious. In "Saving Butterfly McQueen," my favorite story in Bergman's collection, a medical student recalls her visit, as a teen evangelist, to the home of McQueen, the actress who portrayed the maid Prissy in "Gone With the Wind." McQueen's blunt atheism confounds her: (For more on the sisters, turn to Milwaukee writer Dean Jensen's biography, "The Lives and Loves of Daisy and Violet Hilton.") The author also dramatizes in quick, painful scenes the lifelong abuse, manipulation and abandonment they experienced from caregivers, agents and men. "Imagine: you could say nothing, do nothing, eat nothing, touch nothing, love nothing without the other knowing." Through Daisy, Bergman gives us some of the prurient stuff we want to know: how they conducted physical intimacies with men (the inactive partner found ways to tune out mentally), how they sometimes quarreled with each other and occasionally imagined what each would look like alone. "There were no secrets," says Daisy, who tells the story.
"The Pretty, Grown-Together Children" depicts Daisy and Violet Hilton, the conjoined twins and vaudeville performers, in their downtrodden later years, living in a trailer behind the North Carolina store where they bagged groceries. Vincent: ".She feels deep love tinged with resentment, like the pure ice leaching red dye from the river." Characters in several of these stories might resonate with Norma Millay's response to her more famous sister Edna St. But Bergman fictionalizes their lives - often as seen by a sister, admirer or lover - as too wild and too intense to be forgotten.
Megan Mayhew Bergman might have riffed on Gurdjieff's title and called her story collection "Meetings With Remarkable Women" - or even "Infatuations With Remarkable Women." The title she chose, "Almost Famous Women," correctly describes the Q score of the historical figures in her book.
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