DOWNLOAD Son of a Gun (A Memoir) by Justin St. Germain

Book Description

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

A LOS ANGELES TIMES SUMMER READING PICK

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.

Advance praise for Son of a Gun

“A great, momentous undertaking . . . This book is brave, honest, savage, and tender all at once. It broke my heart, and I’m so grateful I’ve read it.”—Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award–winning author of Salvage the Bones

“From an incident of heartbreaking violence, Justin St. Germain has created a clear-eyed and deeply moving meditation on family, geography, and memory, and how difficult it is to find our place in any of them. Son of a Gun is an extraordinary memoir.”—Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds

“Intelligent and compassionate at every step . . . Justin St. Germain stares down his troubled Tombstone boyhood. This is a searing story bravely told.”—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn

“Try not to fall in love with one of the most beautifully raw, brutally honest memoirs I’ve read—I dare you.”—Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon

“[A] searing, brilliant dazzler of a memoir . . . Justin St. Germain has written one of the great memoirs of the American Southwest.”—Three Guys One Book

“Taut . . . audacious . . . compelling . . . Admirably, St. Germain tries to understand how his young adulthood was shaped.”—Kirkus Reviews

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, August 2013

What makes some memoirs “work” better than others? Of course the memoirist’s story counts: and usually, an exciting story works best. And Justin St. Germain certainly has a dramatic tale to tell: his mother was killed by her husband when Justin was a college student living nearby in Arizona with his brother. But St Germain’s memoir, Son of a Gun, is strongest when it’s at its coolest–graceful prose, simple observation, quiet painful admissions of contradictions. (Better educated than his mother, St Germain prides himself on his self-control, but when a TV “news” segment refers to Debbie St Germain’s murder near Tombstone, Arizona as a “wild west mystery,” he goes nuts, calling and excoriating the reporter; while his mother was shot to death, St Germain admits to, still, owning a gun.) Even more impressive is the slow, careful way he constructs a portrait of his mother, a five-times-married ex paratrooper with a taste for violent men and sappy poetry. Who was Debbie St Germain and how did she end up shot in the back in her trailer? In this debut, her son looks deep into her life, his own soul and the heart of our culture to find out. –Sara Nelson

Review
Advance praise for Son of a Gun

“There is a sort of gracefulness in the cadences, and a lovely control of rhythm in the sentences, which do justice to the themes of loss and love that are at the center of this memoir. There is also a level of coiled and accurately conveyed emotion, a careful way of telling truth, and an unsparing release of heartbreak.”—Colm Tóibín, author of The Testament of Mary

Product Details

File Size: 725 KB
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: Random House (August 13, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1400068622
ISBN-13: 978-1400068623