Please join the Unstoppable Frankie Picasso on Tuesday, June 15th, for the last Mission Unstoppable show of the Spring/Summer 2010, www.blogtalkradio.com/missionunstoppable at 8:00 pm edt,  when my guest is Madeleine Hermann, a women of great strength and great character who authored “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 Madeleine as her novel explores this mystery. Partita is her Madeleine's autobiographical story (and  while she fictionalized the novel, to protect a few characters)  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 WW2,she in France, he in Germany, only to meet and fall in love in Iowa. The couple married and moved to California, where they eventually  built two houses and were raising four children, who ranged in age from 11 to 14 when their father died.

Fred was a brilliant linguist, psycologist and violinist and like Ernst, his charater in the book, he died at the height of his career. The book's name Partita,  correlates to Bach's complex violin solo that Ernst Feilder, the character in book is fixated on playing.  The 5 parts of the Partita, correlate to the chapters in Ms. Herrmann's book.

Herrmann now 80, says she has been trying to understand her 39-year-old husband’s action and 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.