Hilary vs. Jackie: SIBLING RIVALRY involved?

Even the book isn't nearly as slanted as the film against Jackie.

The book makes clear that Jackie's love of the cello had nothing to do with wanting to stay together with her older sister the flautist, and Jackie's talent for the cello manifested itself immediately. The obsessive practicing that the movie shows her doing to catch up with her sister? Over and over in the book, both Hilary and Jackie (in quoted interviews) say that Jackie hated practicing and did it only when she absolutely had to. The nature of her talent - her ability to memorize any piece by going through it just once, and the greatness of her music that came through her emotional playing rather than cold technique - was such that she rarely needed to practice.

Looking at pictures of Kiffer, he was better-looking than his wife, and I don't have any difficulty believing his daughter's statement that he had multiple affairs, especially as she has gone uncontradicted by anyone. Presumably because the children of those affairs are proof.

One thing that strikes me about the book is how important it always was to Hilary to be alone with her sister. Lines like, "At last we were alone together" pop up repeatedly in her writing, and I think she unconsciously gives herself away there. She wanted Jackie's full attention and focus, always.

Ultimately Hilary strikes me as someone who was in love with two people in her life - Kiffer and Jackie (since they were sisters, I do not mean this in an incestuous sense, I'm just using the phrase metaphorically to denote the strength of the attachment) - two people who dazzled her, two people who she always and consistently devoted herself to and would have done anything for, and in return she of course wanted their devotion.

And from the book, I don't really have any reason to doubt that Jackie didn't love her greatly. In the book, any cruel words and behavior towards Hilary only happened after Jackie's multiple sclerosis reached an advanced stage. (The affair with Kiffer, Clare Finzi has asserted, was a result of her serial adulterer father taking advantage of her emotionally vulnerable aunt.)

But Kiffer is alive and Jackie is dead, so the book portrays Kiffer as if he is perfect and makes the affair seem a noble gesture on his part while all the negatives are dumped on Jackie's doorstep - she chased him, she begged for it, etc. Seriously, there is not one single negative comment made about Kiffer in the book, not even a "He could be messy." Certainly there is no mention made of his other affairs, so just by reading the book, you would think that he was faithful to Hilary all his life with the exception of the affair with Jackie, in which he only engaged to help her from losing her sanity altogether. See, noble.

I do think there's a little passive-aggressiveness on Hilary's part in revealing the affair at all. She could have simply left it out of the book altogether, because it's not like this was something that was known and had been talked or whispered about previously. I could understand her wanting to give her version of events had that been the case, but to reveal it while simultaneously presenting a whitewashed (in regards to her husband) version is a passive-aggressive strike against her sister in my eyes. My guess is that Kiffer never made Hilary feel like she was special (unlike the film which claims he did, but there's not much evidence of it in the book and certainly not in her daughter's account), and so when he seduced her special sister, although she loved Jackie tremendously she's still only human.