Skeleton Key to the Suicide of My Father Ross Lockridge, Jr.: Author of Raintree County

WHY did my brilliant father Ross Lockridge, Jr. execute himself at 33, while his first novel RAINTREE COUNTY held the Number-One ranking in the United States and was being praised by readers and critics alike as The Great Ameridcan Novel? Even as he was killing himself he was experiencing success beyond the greatest of great expectations, dying in full knowledge that his life, viewed from the street, had exceeded all but the most extravagant of human dreams. My book offers the Skeleton Key that unlocks the Riddle of Raintree County. I do this less from choice than an obligation to history and to truth. Squeamishness and mendacity, blood-brothers, go hand in hand. Miss Manners plays no part in this tragedy. Truth is not subject to etiquette or taste, and it is precisely because the truth about my father's brief, terrible life and his forlorn death is unspeakable that the truth demands to be told.SKELETON KEY is grounded in my own personal relationship with my father and other family members, especially his parents (my grandfather and grandmother), who had a lethal impact upon his life, then attempted a similar impact upon mine. My book is concretely and personally grounded, too, in the culture of the time--in particular, the Kinsey Institute, and Hollywood (e.g.,Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint, Edward Dmytrik and others connected with making of the motion-picture version of RAINTREE COUNTY). I experienced the filming of the movie. I attended its premiere. Wardell Baxter Pomeroy, Kinsey's colorful right-hand man, was our neighbor. As a child playing with the Pomeroy children I learned "peculiarities" of cultural significance, that shed light on my father's place in History.Embedded in my narrative is the covert culture of pervasive pedophilia and childhood sexual abuse, cocooned by institutional protection and denial, and permitted to persist, and to wreak unacknowledged havoc in the lives of innocents.A published novelist, I bring to my memoir a novelist's powers of observation, and a novelist's vision of the intricate, poisonous web of cause-and-effect that ultimately trapped my father and devoured him.Replete with hitherto unpublished photographs, and documents such as my father's medical records from his brief stint in a psychiatric ward shortly before his suicide, SKELETON KEY marries the Memoir with the Graphic Novel.