In real life the family had three children; the youngest was a girl who survived the fire by jumping from a window.
Though this film is based on a true story from the 1990s, it is also strikingly similar to "The Yellow Wallpaper," a fictional short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published in 1892. Both stories are about women married to doctors, who slowly become mentally-ill and end up with their lives destroyed.