The Power Of 'Tennessee Waltz'

After the war, the prolific Belgian author Simenon, father of famed Commissaire Maigret, was not happy with his wife nor with his editor or even with Europe. So he moved to Quebec and started writing again with Denyse Ouimet as his new secretary. As was his custom with all of them, he soon fathered a child with Denyse, keeping all his people in tow when he moved, which he did every year. So a caravan of large cars successively traveled to Connecticut, Tennessee, Arizona etc...buying a huge house at every stop until he had 33. In Reno, he got a quick divorce from his first wife and sent her packing, then started to dip into a Spanish maid. Later Denyse slowly went insane and had to be placed into a mental institution.
Then the beautiful but disturbed daughter Marie-Jo got jealous. When she was 8 years old she already knew that she was madly in love with her father. He had bought her a wedding ring then. In her letters published posthumously she admitted that the happiest moment of her short life was on a transatlantic cruise when daddy asked her for a dance as the band started to play 'Tennessee Waltz'. "He held me tight against his tweed jacket and smelled of wonderful pipe tobacco" .
Later, after having written his biography where he bragged of having had sex with 10,000 women, Mari-Jo asked him "Why not me?" He refused to make love to her even when she threatened him at gunpoint to do so, instead giving her a bottomless bank account. Simenon sent her to an insane asylum several times. She was diagnosed at that time as manic-depressive, but she was mostly depressed for long periods, having few manic attacks like the one just described. A twenty five, after writing 100 wonderful unmailed letters from her all-devouring passion for daddy, she shot herself. "Save me Daddy – I’m dying – I’m lost in the space, the silence of death" In her last message, she asked to be cremated wearing the ring he had given her.
You can read all about it here. Her ashes were spread on a Lausanne lawn where Simenon died several years later, a darkness having enveloped his later years.
I composed this audio track last night thinking about her not a little because I was also obsessed with that same song, albeit not sharing the same degree of affection for her father. The steel guitar continuum is actually a piano play modified by the software. Same for the flute and everything else actually. Hope you like it for a mood to suggest the mind of the disturbed child of an autocratic father. Bi-polar disorder is a problem solving mechanism gone awry, mostly because the problem to be solved just cannot be solved. The dear girl wanted the love of her father. He had told her, "if you love me, please please do not disturb me needlessly". She sometimes spent over a year with no contact from her father, not wanting to displease him.
On a lighter note, I just hope Amélie doesn't develop the same passion for me...but then we had her neutered. That should help.