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Summary
Summary
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 her." -- Entertainment Weekly
Author Notes
Justin St. Germain was born in Philadelphia in 1981. He attended the University of Arizona and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. He lives in Albuquerque.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Aug. 13) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
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 fifth and 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.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
JUSTIN ST. GERMAIN'S spectacular memoir, "Son of a Gun," 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. All three feature disappeared fathers. And all three dig into the reality behind the facade of the American dream: namely, that there is no glory in being a blue-collar grunt in this country, that to be working class is to live a tenuous existence, one in which the authors and half the people they know are one misstep away from surfing garage-sale sofas in other people's living rooms. Moehringer's and Flynn's books were set firmly in the humid, crowded American East. "Son of a Gun," by stark contrast, is set in Arizona, the scorched, vast landscape of the new West - populated, in St. Germain's skillful rendering, with people washed out of the East and determined to begin afresh. It's as if the characters in Moehringer's and Flynn's books had picked up and headed toward the setting sun, only to find themselves squinting into the desolation of a border town, the desert light throwing into harsh relief the feckless notion that they ever could have started over. It's "an elitist fantasy, the simple life," St. Germain writes of that lying dream. "I ought to know better, ought to remember how it feels to live in a place like this, the grinding poverty, the lack of opportunity, all the kinds of self-defeat - alcohol, drugs, gossip - the gnawing fear that you haven't gotten away from the world, it's gotten away from you." The vehicle of St. Germain's book, the method by which he moves the narrative through time and place, is the killing of his mother, Deborah, at the age of 44, apparently by her fifth husband, Ray, a wrecked ex-cop about 10 years her junior. From the beginning we're told that Deborah - "a former Army paratrooper, the toughest woman I've ever known" - had a thing for violent men, that she took them in and tried to love them back to wholeness. "And there was Ray, a man adrift, a project. She played the martyr until she became one." But this potentially sordid fact - the gruesome murder of an illogically optimistic, erratically creative woman who "liked horses and men," though "that's not who she was" - is not, as it might have been in the hands of a lesser writer, the book's main point. St. Germain's bigger story, the one amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation, is about a place awash with guns and paranoia, where men and women toil at grueling, thankless jobs and make misguided alliances in a desperate attempt to defend against loneliness. Nowhere is this more wittily rendered than in St. Germain's reading of the Arizona "Marriage Handbook," written in Spanish and English and distributed to everyone applying for a marriage license: "The handbook contains sections on 'Addressing Economic Issues,' 'Taking Responsibility for Raising Children' and 'Learning Effective Confrontation.' I guess Ray never read it. It also has sections on 'Protecting Yourself From Domestic Violence' and 'Making a Personal Safety Plan.' I guess Mom didn't read it either." Guns and violence form the weather system roiling throughout St. Germain's memoir, and his deceptively nonchalant prose both cushions and perpetuates the shock of the injuries they precipitate. From the murder of his own mother, to the killing of a neighbor by her husband, to St. Germain's part in the youthful - dare I say playful - pellet-gun shooting of three girls, the writing is so matter-of-fact it reflects the casualness with which such cruelty is accepted in certain strata of our society: "Danny paused, and I hoped he was done shooting, because I'd already lost the stomach for it. But he fired again, and again and again and again A scream, another. When it was over, all three girls had been hit and were grabbing at their tiny wounds, crying." We know, without St. Germain ever saying as much, that these tiny wounds are practice for the bigger wounds these girls have coming. This isn't just speculation. At a support-group meeting in a rundown hospital complex in Tucson years after his mother's death, St. Germain discovers that "everyone in this room lost their loved one to an angry man," and that "judging solely by appearance, especially clothes and shoes, the one constant here is that everyone is working class, which makes sense, because so are a disproportionate number of the murder victims in America." Violence is America's fetish, and it's St. Germain's bête noire. In Tombstone, Ariz., where he's raised after his mother lands there (according to a former fiancé, "she'd always wanted to see the O.K. Corral," the setting of Wyatt Earp's notorious gunfight), he remarks of the World's Largest Rosebush, "It's my favorite place in all of Tombstone, the only pure thing in this whole town, the only attraction that doesn't depend on somebody dying." This single elegant sentence proves that if the brilliance of "Son of a Gun" lies in its restraint, its importance lies in the generosity of the author's insights. The murder of St. Germain's mother drives his narrative, but his true subjects are guns, violence and blue-collar struggle. Alexandra Fuller is the author, most recently, of "Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness."
Kirkus Review
A taut, grim memoir weighing Western mythology against a family tragedy. Central to this debut from St. Germain (Creative Writing/Univ. of New Mexico) is a horrific yet all-too-common act of domestic violence. While he was a struggling undergraduate, his mother was murdered by her fifth husband, Ray, who killed himself after a few months on the run. His mother was sexually independent, a former Army paratrooper and a small-business owner in Tombstone, Ariz., "the toughest woman I've ever known." Nonetheless, St. Germain was long concerned about her, as she married Ray (a taciturn cop who seemed like a "good guy" after several abusive relationships) and then embarked with him on a strange "adventure" that appeared to be an aimless drift through the Southwest. Before this, however, the author paints an acerbic picture of his upbringing in Tombstone: "Broke, single, getting fat, drunk, seventeen: I was white trash." St. Germain thus constructs an audacious framework for his memoir, indirectly implicating Tombstone's sour, touristy culture and the Western myths derived from the famous altercation at the O.K. Corral in his ponderings as to how his mother's unorthodox life choices may have contributed to her fate. Some of these comparisons are compelling, such as the author's examination of the unsavory distance between myth and reality in the real life of Wyatt Earp; others are less fully explored, as when he briefly looks at contemporary gun culture in his account of his attempt to purchase the small handgun that killed his mother. Admirably, St. Germain tries to understand how his young adulthood was shaped by the murder, and he considers the costs of the idea of American masculinity that seemingly produces inevitable bloodshed. Although he doggedly reconstructs the final months of his mother's life, any real resolution seems limited: "I know more about Wyatt Earp than I do about my mother." An above-average personal narrative that takes a hard look at the aftermath of violence.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
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 (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Beast Soon after we learned that our mother was dead, my brother and I went to a bar. We'd already worked the phones. Josh had called our grandparents, who'd been divorced for forty years but both still lived in Philadelphia. Grandpop said he'd book the first flight he could, but air travel was snarled from the attacks nine days earlier. Grandma was afraid of flying, so she stayed in her rented room in suburban Philly, wrecked and helpless. I called my dad's house in New Hampshire, but he wasn't home. Eventually he called back. I told him she was dead and a long pause ensued, one in a litany of silences between my father and me, stretching across the years since he'd left and the distance between us, thousands of miles, most of America. Finally he said she was a good person, that he'd always cared for her. He asked if I wanted him to fly to Arizona. I said he didn't have to and hung up. I emailed my professors and told them what had happened, that I wouldn't be back in class for a while. I called the office of the college newspaper where I worked and told my boss. Josh called in sick to his bartending job. Then we sat on the couch with our roommate, Joe, an old friend from Tombstone we'd known since grade school. It was a Thursday, and we had nothing to do. Somebody suggested the French Quarter, a Cajun joint nearby that had spicy gumbo and potent hurricanes. It seemed like a good idea: I'd heard stories of grief in which the stricken couldn't eat, but I was hungry, and I needed a drink. So that's where we spent our first night without her. When we walked in, President Bush was on TV, about to give a speech. The jukebox was turned off, as it had been since the attacks, because now everybody wanted to hear the news. Joe went to the bar to talk to some of the regulars. Josh and I took a booth in the corner. Orion, the bartender and a friend of ours, came over and told us he was sorry, and to have whatever we wanted on the house. I wondered if Joe had just told him or if he'd already heard. I didn't know yet how quickly or how far the news would travel, that within a few hours we wouldn't need to tell anyone about our mother, because everyone would already know. I flipped through the menu but couldn't understand it. We'd both put our cell phones on the tabletop, and mine rang, chirping as it skittered across the glass. I ignored it. "What now?" I asked. Josh kept his eyes on the menu and shook his head. "There's not much we can do." "Should we go out there?" I didn't know what to call the place where she'd died; it wasn't home, because we'd never lived there, and it didn't have a name. It was just a piece of land in the desert outside of Tombstone. "We can't. The property is a crime scene." I asked him if we should talk to the cops and he said he already had, that we were meeting with them on Monday. I asked about a funeral home and he said the coroner had to do an autopsy first, the cops said it was standard procedure. There was a long pause. My mother and her parents always said Josh was more like my father, difficult to read, and he looked like Dad, too, sharp nosed and handsome. I got more from my mother, they said, the dark and heavy brows, the temper, the heart on my sleeve. But if I was like my mother, why was I so numb? Food arrived. Through the windows I watched the sky outside go purple and the traffic on Grant die down. A hot breeze blew through the open door. On television, President Bush identified the enemy, a vast network of terror that wanted to kill all of us, and finally he said the name of a murderer. "Do you think Ray did it?" I asked. The police couldn't find our stepfather or the pickup truck he and my mother owned. He was the only suspect, but I didn't want to believe it. Josh waited a while to respond, chewing, letting his eyes wander the walls decorated with beads and Mardi Gras masks and a neon sign above the bar that said "Geaux Tigers." "We'll know for sure when they find him." A pool cue cracked and a ball fell into a pocket with a hollow knock. My phone rang again. I didn't answer. My voice mail was already full, and the calls kept coming, from distant family, my friends, her friends, acquaintances from Tombstone, people I hardly knew. At first I'd answered, but the conversations went exactly the same: they'd say they were sorry and I'd thank them for calling; they'd ask for news and I'd say there wasn't any; they'd ask if there was anything they could do and I'd say no. It was easier to let them leave a message. On the TV, the president talked about a long campaign to come, unlike anything we'd ever seen. He said to live our lives and hug our children. He said to be calm and resolute in the face of a continuing threat. "You think he'd come here?" I asked. Ray knew where we lived. He'd been to the house a few times, with our mother, staying on the pullout couch in the living room. "The detective mentioned that. He said he doubted it, but to keep an eye out." I wondered what good that would do but didn't ask. Josh said we'd know more on Monday, after we met with the cops. "What do we do until then?" I could tell Josh was wondering the same thing: what the hell were we going to do? "Wait, I guess." Behind me the pool table rumbled as the players began another game. I looked down at my plate, realized that my food was gone, and scanned the old newspaper articles from New Orleans pasted beneath the glass tabletop. My mother was dead. I leaned back against the vinyl seat and finished my beer, watching the president try to soothe a wounded nation. He said that life would return to normal, that grief recedes with time and grace, but that we would always remember, that we'd carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever. Late that night, I said a prayer for the first time in months. When I was a kid, Mom had always made me say prayers before bed, and it became a habit, something I felt guilty if I didn't do. I'd stopped praying regularly after I left home, but that night I prayed for my mother's soul, because I knew she'd want me to, and I figured it couldn't hurt. I didn't pray for my own safety; I knew better than to rely on God for that. Instead, I got up off my knees, pulled a long gray case out of my closet, laid it on the bed, and flipped the catches. Inside, on a bed of dimpled foam, lay a rifle, a gift from my father on my thirteenth birthday, an old Lee-Enfield bolt-action. I lifted it out of the case, loaded it, chambered a round, and rested it against the wall by my bed. Then I tried to sleep, but every time a car passed, I sat up to peek out the window, expecting to see Ray in our front yard. After a few sleepless hours I got up and went to my desk. I turned on my computer, opened a Word document, and stared at the blank screen. I kept a journal, in which I wrote to the future self I imagined, chronicling important moments in my life, because I thought he might want to remember, and because it made me feel less alone. I would write about how much I missed Tombstone, how dislocated I felt after moving from a town of fifteen hundred people to a city thirty times that size, how I felt like an impostor at school, was failing half my classes, would never graduate. I wrote about girls. I wrote about money, how little I had, my mounting debt, my fear that I wouldn't be able to cover tuition and rent. And I wrote about Mom, how she'd gone crazy after I moved out, how she and Ray had sold our trailer outside of Tombstone and gone touring the country with their horses, camping in national parks, how one day I'd get a card in the mail postmarked from Utah, and the next she'd send an email from Nebraska--all of them signed xoxo, Mom and Ray--and how she'd leave rambling messages on our answering machine at five o'clock in the morning, saying how much she loved and missed us. I thought I should write something about that day, so the future me never forgot how it had felt to be twenty and motherless, my life possibly in danger, numb from shock and hating my own inability to feel. But I didn't know what to say. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to do the feeling justice, that I'd choose the wrong words. I was in my first literature class at the time, an American lit survey, and I'd just written a paper on Henry James's "The Beast in the Jungle." So I did what any English major would: I quoted someone else. My mother is dead. The Beast has sprung. It worked. I sat down to write at the end of every day for the next few weeks, and each time the words came easily. Sometimes I return to those entries, when I'm afraid I've begun to forget. But I can't read them for long without wanting to write back to my old self, to warn him of what's to come, to tell him that the Beast will always be with us. I woke up the first day after learning of her death and turned off my alarm, then went back to sleep until the room got too bright. When I woke again, I looked out the window at the yard full of weeds. I stood, stretched, brushed my teeth. Walking down the hall into the living room, wondering what I'd do with the day ahead--it was Friday, so I had a softball game that night, and afterward somebody would be having a party--I glanced through the screen door at the front porch and remembered. My grandfather arrived from Philly that afternoon, pale and harried, lighting new cigarettes with the still-burning stubs of the last. We went straight from the airport to a Denny's by the highway and sat drinking iced tea and watching cars pass by outside, planes taking off and landing, families piling out of minivans in the parking lot, other people going places. The world hadn't stopped, despite how it seemed to us. When our food came, we picked at it and discussed our plans. My dad had decided to come and would be flying in the next day. On Monday we had meetings scheduled with the detectives and the funeral director and my mother's bank and lawyer, a gauntlet none of us wanted to think or talk about. My mother's closest friend, Connie, was taking care of the horses and Chance, Ray's dog, who'd been left behind. She said that my mother's property was still cordoned off, that the cops were there in a helicopter, looking for Ray or for his body. We'd go to Tombstone in the morning. For now, there was nothing we could do but try to get some rest. Grandpop went back to his hotel. Josh and I went home and sat on the couch watching pirated cable for the rest of the afternoon. As the room began to dim, I checked the time and remembered that I had a softball game in half an hour. I went to my room and changed. When I walked out carrying my bat bag, Josh asked where I was going. Excerpted from Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.