Partita, When a Husband Commits Suicide with Madelaleine Hermann

Please join the Unstoppable Frankie Picasso on Tuesday, June 15th, for the last Mission Unstoppable show of the Spring/Summer 2010, when my guest is Madeleine Hermann, an amazing woman and the incredible author of “Partita: A Psychological Mystery.” What happens when a husband kills himself? What questions lay unanswered for his wife, his family? How does a family survive? Tonight I will discuss this and more with Madeliene as her novel explores this mystery. Partita is an autobiographical novel that is fictionalized, as Ms. Hermann states to protect a few people. Partita, explores and pieces together the life that Madeleine shared with her husband, Fred Herrmann, a German linguist, professor and violinist who committed suicide in 1969. Fred and Madeleine had both survived the war,she in France, he in Germany, only to meet and fall in love in Iowa. The couple moved to California, where they had built two houses and were raising four children, who ranged in age from 11 to 14 when their father died. Since then, Herrmann now 80. says she has been trying to understand her 39-year-old husband’s action. Her memoir, begun more than 20 years ago, became a novel in the past few years so she could explore the clues and draw conclusions that she could only prove in her heart, she says.