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Son of a Gun

A Memoir

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a stunning memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also the searing, unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath

Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s death, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone, while barroom gossips snicker cruelly. But for her twenty-year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after.
 
Distancing himself from the legendary town of his childhood, Justin makes another life a world away in San Francisco and achieves all the surface successes that would have filled his mother with pride. Yet years later he’s still sleeping with a loaded rifle under his bed. Ultimately, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, a onetime army paratrooper, the type of woman who would stand up to any man except the men she was in love with? What led her to move from place to place, man to man, job to job, until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of desert with an unstable ex-cop?
 
Justin’s journey takes him back to the ghost town of Wyatt Earp, to the trailers he and Debbie shared, to the string of stepfathers who were a constant, sometimes threatening presence in his life, to a harsh world on the margins full of men and women all struggling to define what family means. He decides to confront people from his past and delve into the police records in an attempt to make sense of his mother’s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.
 
Praise for Son of a Gun
 
“[A] spectacular memoir . . . calls to mind two others of the past decade: J. R. Moehringer’s Tender Bar and Nick Flynn’s Another Bull____ Night in Suck City. All three are about boys becoming men in a broken world. . . . [What] might have been . . . in the hands of a lesser writer, the book’s main point . . . [is] amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation. . . . If the brilliance of Son of a Gun lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author’s insights.”—Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review
“[A] gritty, enthralling new memoir . . . St. Germain has created a work of austere, luminous beauty. . . . In his understated, eloquent way, St. Germain makes you feel the heat, taste the dust, see those shimmering streets. By the end of the book, you know his mother, even though you never met her. And like the author, you will mourn her forever.”NPR
 
“If St. Germain had stopped at examining his mother’s psycho-social risk factors and how her murder affected him, this would still be a fine, moving memoir. But it’s his further probing—into the culture of guns, violence, and manhood that informed their lives in his hometown, Tombstone, Ariz.—that transforms the book, elevating the stakes from personal pain to larger, important questions of what ails our society.”The Boston Globe
 
“A visceral, compelling portrait of [St. Germain’s] mother and the violent culture that claimed...
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      June 3, 2013
      A young man wrestles with his heartache over his mother’s murder in this lacerating memoir of family dysfunction. St. Germain was a 20-year-old college student when his mother Debbie was shot to death in 2001 by her fifth husband in a desolate trailer in the Arizona desert, a disaster that threw into sharp relief the chaos of his working-class background. St. Germain revisits Debbie’s unstable life as an Army paratrooper and businesswoman, the string of men she took up with (some physically abusive), and his own boyhood resentment at their presence and at incessant domestic upheaval. Intertwined is a jaundiced, somewhat self-conscious meditation on St. Germain’s claustrophobic hometown of Tombstone—all sun-bleached ennui, arid hardpan, and tourist kitsch—and its presiding spirit, Wyatt Earp, archetype of the violent, trigger-happy machismo that he blames for killing his mother, yet feels drawn to as a touchstone of manhood. St. Germain makes harsh judgments of the men in his past (as well as of his sullen, callous adolescent self), but as he seeks them out later, he arrives, almost against his will, at a subtler appreciation of their complexities. At times his trauma feels more dutiful than deeply felt, but his memoir vividly conveys the journey from youthful victimization toward mature understanding.

    • Library Journal

      December 1, 2013
      In this somber memoir, St. Germain chronicles his mother's murder at the hands of his stepfather, who shot her eight times in her shoulder and chest, then left her in a trailer in the desert. The who, what, where, and how are well known; the only mystery left is why it happened. St. Germain does not find any easy answers as he recalls his own childhood in Arizona, revisiting his memories of the mother he only partially knew. She was a woman of contradictions: she had a career as an army paratrooper but also became involved in a series of abusive relationships that damaged all the members of her small family. Her son writes with clear-eyed acknowledgment of the harm this caused him, admitting that he couldn't fully grieve at the time of her death, yet would never shake off the shadow cast over his future. Narrator George Newbern's youthful voice and the restrained emotion he conveys capture the mournful, compassionate, and self-reflective tone of the book. VERDICT Well done on all fronts; highly recommended. [One of "LJ"'s Best Core Nonfiction titles of 2013, p. 26.--Ed.]--Victoria A. Caplinger, NoveList, Durham, NC

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Booklist

      July 1, 2013
      In 2001, days after the Twin Towers fell, University of Arizona student St. Germain is notified by his roommate-brother, Josh, that their mother has been shot and killed, murdered at her home in Tombstone, best known for its connection with Wyatt Earp. St. Germain was raised there, and he uses the Earp legend and its history in counterpoint to his own. In the succeeding days, while President Bush addresses the nation's grief on television, Josh and Justin try to come to terms with theirs, and over the succeeding years, they try to sort out the details of the crime and of their unusual mom's life. Their mother's husband (her fifthand we meet them all), Ray, a local cop and the presumed killer, is found dead, a suicide, three months after the crime, thus eliminating any mystery element here, and St. Germain fails to bring sufficient drama or tension to the story of his quest to substitute for this missing ingredient. Still, the book's similarity to James Ellroy's best-selling account of his mother's murder, My Dark Places (1996), and the likelihood of media appearances by St. Germain may generate considerable demand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

    • Library Journal

      March 15, 2013

      Irretrievably marked by his mother's 2001 murder in Tombstone, AZ, despite subsequent successes (e.g., he became a Stegner Fellow), St. Germain found himself back in the desert where he grew up with a string of undependable and sometimes violent stepfathers, trying to understand what happened.

      Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

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