Who provided information on Inez Garcia?

Answer 1

In my recent novel Secret Love, San Francisco attorney and civil rights leader, Jake Roseman, mourns the death of his wife, Inez. Like Jake, I was haunted by the mystery behind Inez's death and decided to write a stand-alone novel, from her point of view, set in 1962, two years earlier than the time of Secret Love. Why would a woman whose life appeared so charmed choose suicide? Although a physical beauty, a violinist of prodigious talent, the mother of two lovely children, and the wife of a simpatico man, Inez is possessed by a quiet engine that is driving her toward annihilation.

More than two years into the writing of Beautiful Inez, I realized that Inez Roseman suffered in part from what may have plagued my own mother: a postpartum depression, that rather than being a temporary hormonal downswing, took up permanent residence within the skin. I recalled hearing stories about my mother, that for months after my birth she couldn't bear to sleep on the same floor as me, that the sound of a baby crying drove her up the wall. Postpartum depression hadn't been identified as such in the 1950s, when I was born and when Inez gave birth to her children. A half century later, the condition's potential danger and wide-spread incidence is just beginning to be recognized.

I don't believe that suicide arises from a single cause. As a character, Inez Roseman develops an entire climate of reasons for taking her own life. As a young prodigy, she'd been denied a good part of her childhood. Growing up in a symphony family as I did (my father was a violinist in the San Francisco Symphony for fifty years), I heard many stories about former prodigies who suffered the peculiar dislocation that life as a section musician represented.

Beautiful Inez is actually a novel about two women. Sylvia Bran (waitress, showroom pianist, part-time journalist, amateur linguist, petty thief, voyeur, and budding bohemian), may be a strange bedfellow for Inez Roseman, but she is able to open Inez up in a way that she hasn't been opened in years. A waltz between love and betrayal, Beautiful Inez involves women ten years apart in chronological age, one having come of age in the forties, while the other is becoming a woman of the sixties.

As a man, writing alternately from the point of view of two women, I tried to enter the mind and spirit of each woman as deeply as I could. But for me, the key to understanding how experience and the cultural moment shaped these women, depended on inhabiting their bodies with as much fidelity as my imagination allowed.