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Son of a Gun: A Memoir
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Random House Publishing Group 2013
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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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Street Date:
08/13/2013
Language:
English
ISBN:
9780345538741
ASIN:
B00BH0VSJY
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APA Citation (style guide)

Justin St. Germain. (2013). Son of a Gun: A Memoir. Random House Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

Justin St. Germain. 2013. Son of a Gun: A Memoir. Random House Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

Justin St. Germain, Son of a Gun: A Memoir. Random House Publishing Group, 2013.

MLA Citation (style guide)

Justin St. Germain. Son of a Gun: A Memoir. Random House Publishing Group, 2013.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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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...
reviews
      • premium: False
      • source: Alexandra Fuller, The New York Times Book Review
      • content:

        "[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."

      • premium: False
      • source: Entertainment Weekly
      • content: "[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."
      • premium: False
      • source: BookPage
      • content: "Emotionally raw and beautifully written . . . a book you won't soon forget."
      • premium: False
      • source: GQ
      • content: "Impossible to put down . . . Son of a Gun is a raw, compelling read that stays with you beyond the last page."
      • premium: False
      • source: Jesmyn Ward, National Book Award--winning author of Salvage the Bones
      • content: "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."
      • premium: False
      • source: Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn
      • content: "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 "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."
      • premium: False
      • source: Benjamin Percy, author of Red Moon
      • content: "Try not to fall in love with one of the most beautifully raw, brutally honest memoirs I've read--I dare you."
      • premium: False
      • source: Kirkus Reviews
      • content: "[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."
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        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.

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        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.

      • premium: True
      • source: Booklist
      • content:

        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.)

      • premium: True
      • source: Library Journal
      • content:

        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.

popularity
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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...
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