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    Son of a Gun: A Memoir
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    Son of a Gun: A Memoir
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    Son of a Gun: A Memoir
    Audiobook6 hours

    Son of a Gun: A Memoir

    Written by Justin St. Germain

    Narrated by George Newbern

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateAug 13, 2013
    ISBN9780804128889
    Unavailable
    Son of a Gun: A Memoir

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    Reviews for Son of a Gun

    4/5

    60 ratings19 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Wonderful writing but, oh such a sad and haunting story. It has settled around me like a cloak.
    • 4/5
      Justin St. Germain, a professor at the University of New Mexico, wrote this memoir after trying to understand why his mother was murdered by his stepfather. "Ray" was one of many sometime fathers that Justin and his brother lived with while growing up. Not knowing him to be a violent man, Justin is attempting to unravel the mystery behind the day when his mother was shot to death in her mobile home outside Tombstone, Arizona. He relates the violent history of Tombstone itself informing the reader of the story of Wyatt Earp. This culture of violence permeates the memoir asJustin attempts to decipher the motive behind his mother's murder. He is not judgmental of his his mother's lifestyle but seems to be working his way through profound grief. This memoir rang true in that the ending left Justin and the reader still in a state of unsatisfied "closure".
    • 4/5
      Having just finished reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild, Justin St. Germain's Son of a Gun is an interesting followup. Both authors lost their mothers when they were in their twenties, and searching for what the loss means for the children left behind form the basis for both excellent memoirs.Son of a Gun opens with Justin returning home to the house he shares with his brother Josh only to be told that their mother Debbie was dead; she had been shot by someone. The young men begin the process of calling their grandparents and long-estranged father. When Justin told his father he writes,"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 left and the distance between us, thousands of miles, most of America."From there we learn that Justin and Josh were raised by their mother, a strong, tough woman, a former paratrooper in the military whose career was ended by an injury in a jump. The irony of Debbie was that her weakness was men.She chose the wrong man to love, time and time again. She dated many, lived with some, became engaged to more than a few, and married five of them. Some of the men were good, but most treated her badly. She was beaten by some, and lied to by many of them.Debbie went from job to job as well. For awhile, she ran a tourist gift shop in Tombstone, Arizona. She had a failed restaurant there as well. Eventually, she married Ray, a cop, whom Justin didn't really like, but had hoped would take good care of his mother as he turned eighteen and left home for college.Ray and Debbie moved away from Tombstone, out in the middle of nowhere, where they lived in a beat-up trailer, hoping to build their own home. This isolation wasn't good for Debbie, and she didn't see her sons often. They were living their own lives and therefore didn't see everything going on with Debbie and Ray.Justin described his mother this way:"But she also loved to play the martyr. Whenever I got in trouble at school, I'd hear it: I gave my whole life for you and this is how you repay me? In one breath she'd say we didn't owe her anything, and in the next she'd list everything she'd suffered so we could have a better life. Most of the marks on her ledger were true, but she tried to pin her failed relationships on us; once or twice she even tried to claim that we were the reason she stayed through the abuse, as if we were the ones who wanted whatever sort of family we had with those men. There had to be someone to blame, and it was never her."In the end though, people did blame Debbie for her own death. People who knew her and the sheriff investigating the murder felt that Debbie paid the ultimate price for making several wrong choices, especially when it came to men. It was almost as if they said, "well, what do you expect?"The writing here is beautiful, at times poetic and always unsparingly honest. Justin takes us on his journey to discover how his mother's life had fallen so off-track. He links the independence of the culture of people who lived in Tombstone, where Wyatt Earp became famous for the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and their love of guns with his mother's murder. Would this have happened if she lived somewhere else?I found the chapter where he attends a gun show intriguing, as well as the fact that he and his brother could not collect their mother's life insurance until the murder was solved. I had never heard that before. What if it was never solved; does that mean the insurance company keeps the money? That didn't seem fair at all.In the end, Justin determines that everyday he has to choose what kind of man he wants to be. He can choose to give into the depression and grief or he could get his life together. He can do nothing with his life, drifting, working low-paying dead-end jobs, drinking every night to numb the pain or he can move forward. I'm glad he chose the path he did; his story can give hope to those who feel lost.
    • 5/5
      This is thoroughly captivating story who loses his mother to a savage murder. Not only is it a wonderful tribute to his mother and a uniquely interesting family history - it is so much more. The majority of the book takes place in Tombstone, Arizona - the town to tough to die. The author skillfully interweaves a lot of local history with special focus on Wyatt Earp, his brothers and the shootout at the OK coral and much, much more. The book is stylishly conceived and sensitively and beautifully written. The only thing I wonder about with a book that is so personal is whether the author will have a second book and how will he keep such a high standard. Nevertheless, I eagerly look forward to Mr. St. Germain's next book.
    • 4/5
      First things first: I received this book free from LibraryThing Early Readers in return for this review. This did not effect my review in any way.This was a hard book to read and it is a hard book to review. Son of a Gun is the most honest book I can recall reading, which is wonderful, but also uncomfortable. I know people who read a lot of memoir will say that this level of honesty is not uncommon, but it is. Take, for example, The Glass Castle (a book I really liked.) Honest? Sure. But it was in the hands of a great raconteur. The author chose stories which, though sometimes repellant, were entertaining. And at the end of the day the endings, though sometimes tragic, were spun into positives. It was a charming slideshow of a nightmare childhood. Nothing wrong with that at all, as I said I liked the book very much, it is just different than this. There are no happy endings here, no endings at all. I chose Glass Castle because I have seen it cited for comparison in some of the marketing materials for Son of a Gun. I want to mention here that this book is nothing like Glass Castle. It is not the story of a miserable childhood. It is not the story of a selfish or mentally ill parent. It is not a story of triumph over adversity. This is in part an "anatomy of a murder," but the murder story just provides the skeleton for the book's real focus. Son of a Gun is a memoir of suppressed grief. Son of a Gun is a meditation on what it means to be a man, particularly in the Southwest where steel-jawed machismo and gun love are king. Son of a Gun is an exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world where your accomplishments may be many but you have been trained to beleive you are a failure if you don't have a man. To some extent the book examines the ways in which people mistake obsession and cruelty for love. There is a lot of great stuff here, but that is also the book's downfall. I felt that the author tried to do too much. To much of a muchness, to misquote Alice in Wonderland. I get that these themes are all interlaced to attack the American heteronormative ideal. That a man steeped in the cowboy myth of violence and detachment and a woman steeped in the Disney princess myth of life not existing without a Prince Charming are likely to result in a couple fueled by need that has nothing to do with love and passion that can only be released through violence. I agree with the theory to a some extent. That said, there are a lot of threads here, not all are brought together by the author, and it leaves an unfinished or disjointed quality. Still a compelling read and highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      For some reason I kept forgetting this was a memoir - maybe because it read more like a novel; maybe because, even though the subject was the murder of the author's mother by his stepfather, Germain felt oddly distant.It was an interesting read, although the back details about Tombstone and Wyatt Earp felt like padding and slowed the pace down.
    • 4/5
      Son of a Gun, the new memoir by Justin St. Germain, at first glance appears to be simply a son’s eulogy to his murdered mother. But it is much more than that because of how St. Germain uses his mother’s story to reflect also upon the precarious blue collar struggle so many people face today, one in which one missed paycheck can throw an entire family into the kind of tailspin from which it might take years to recover – if they ever do manage the trick. Former Army paratrooper Debbie St. Germain was an extraordinary woman who met what some would say was a predictable end for a woman whose taste in men was always a little iffy. When she was only 44, her fifth husband, a burned out ex-cop who saw himself as something of a modern day Wyatt Earp, murdered her. That he and Debbie claimed nearby Tombstone, Arizona, as their hometown made it easier for her killer to maintain his deluded self-image. Tombstone is, of course, the site of Earp’s infamous “Showdown at the O.K. Corral,” the short burst of gunfire that ensured his reputation as one of the fiercest gunfighters of his day.Debbie met her fate in September 2001, just days after the horrors of 9-11. At the time, Justin was a 20-year-old student living with his brother in Tucson where the two were struggling to make ends meet. Justin knew that he would never have been able to afford school without the financial sacrifices his hardworking mother gladly made on his behalf. But that was the least of his concerns; now his mother was dead and he and his brother were stunned by the suddenness of it. Despite their shock - especially since he was nowhere to be found after the murder – the boys were certain that Ray, husband number five, was responsible for taking their mother from them.Some ten years later, the author felt ready to try to make sense of what happened to his mother. He returned to Tombstone and began talking to people who knew his mother in ways a son can never know her. He studied police case records in hope that he would learn more about Ray, the unbalanced loner with whom she was living on an isolated patch of ground on the day he ended her life. Justin St. Germain learned much about his mother and her death that he did not know, including what hers and her killer’s final moments were probably like, but he already knew the most important thing about her: she did not leave him. And he is determined to be the man she wanted him to be.Bottom Line: Son of a Gun is a touching memoir that takes a hard look at a gun culture whose victims are most often individuals very much like his mother, people struggling not so much to get ahead but simply to stay even. This is their story.
    • 5/5
      Just a few days after 9/11, in a remote trailer, outside of Tombstone Arizona, a woman is shot to death. Her fifth husband and probable killer, has disappeared. The author of this haunting memoir was twenty years old at the time. His mother’s death left his life in tatters and he spent the next ten years, repairing the damage and looking for answers. What really happened in that trailer, that fateful day? He did not like his step-father Ray but would have never imagined him capable of murdering his wife. Did he do it or was it someone else?St. Germain has great writing chops, following the lean, gritty style of Mary Karr, James Ellroy and Jeanette Walls and he has crafted an excellent story, filled with his own pain and frustration. His descriptions of the hot, dusty landscapes and the wasted little ghost-towns, along with the real-life characters that populate these desolate areas, are insightful and spot-on. I hope this is just the beginning for this young talented writer.
    • 4/5
      A combination memoir, history, and true crime book.  Justin loses his mother to murder at the hands of his step father.  Justin goes on a quest to find out what happened.  The historical part comes in because the book takes place near Tombstone.  The story of Earp and the OK Corral are intertwined throughout the memoir.  I enjoyed this intermingling quite a lot.  This is a great mother/son book written with a lot of emotion.  Sometimes I feel memoirs can get bogged down, but I did not feel that with this one.  I wanted to read every word and finish the journey with Justin.
    • 4/5
      In Son of a Gun: A Memoir, Justin St. Germain revisits his past in order to come to terms with his mother's murder by his step-father. Justin and his brother hadn't particularly liked Ray, his mother's last husband, but they'd liked him more than most of his mother's husbands and boyfriends and thought that they were happy together. Debbie had been in the military and she wasn't a passive woman. She'd left men when things turned sour, so why did she stay with Ray? Less a murder mystery like My Dark Places than an attempt by the author to find a place to put his rage and unresolved questions that dogged him for a decade after his mother's death, Son of a Gun is a hodge podge of memories, history of his hometown of Tombstone, Arizona and account of his own search for the reason behind her murder. It really shouldn't work, but maybe because of the author's willingness to be honest and the admiration he feels for his mother, a woman who loved him and who always fought to keep her head up and her optimism intact, this book is worth reading and hard to put down.
    • 3/5
      With Son of a Gun Justin St. Germain seeks to find the meaning in his mother's murder. The writing is emotionally flat and the story is skimpy. I kept reading because I figured by the end there would be a big revelation or significant closure; there was neither. St. Germain dabbles in exploring western themes, drawing a thread about Tombstone, Arizona through the book. This made me long for Stegner, Proulx, and Richard Shelton's Going Back to Bisbee.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this memoir. I enjoyed the way he paralleled things in his life to the Old West stories surrounding Tombstone and Wyatt Earp's life. I grew up not far from Dodge City, so I enjoyed how he was able to take parts of his life and show how they played to the larger-than-life stories from the past.As with so many memoirs that include domestic abuse as a theme, there isn't really a grand happy ending, and not all loose ends are tied neatly. However, St. Germain tells his story and that of his mother wonderfully. The drama is executed perfectly to keep it interesting, and the story is honest enough that the reader feels the frustration as the author seeks out answers. There is nothing exceptionally groundbreaking in Son of a Gun, but it is a well-told story and a memoir well-worth reading. One hopes St. Germain finds some solace and healing, though he could not recreate his mother's life or murder by going back to Tombstone.*I received this book as an Advanced Reader's Copy from Goodreads First Reads.
    • 4/5
      I got this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers. I don't want to say I enjoyed this book because that seems akin to saying I enjoy reading about the pain of loss but this was very well written and the juxtaposition of Tombstone and all that implies was quite interesting. The author tries to make sense of the senseless, as we all would in a similar situation. Unfortunately people's motives are murky and this book really shows how you only think you may know someone.
    • 4/5
      My heart broke for these sons who lost their mother in such a horribly violent way. Alot of her life was very sad, trying and failing, to find a lasting and happy marriage. Although, you can tell that her sons were the love of her life and she was proud of them and they brought her joy. Like many women, sadly, they don't have enough feelings of self worth to make it without a man and are continually drawn to the wrong type. I hope that the author ultimately finds peace and I thank him for opening up to us.
    • 4/5
      Excellent well written story of a son who ponders the meaning of his mothers murder. While you know who did the crime, the writer is trying to find out why. The story never loses momentum never gets stale or boring, it does fold back on its self and new bits of information are added. I loved the writing style and will read more of Mr. St. Germain books should he publish. Thank you for the opportunity to read this one.
    • 2/5
      I really wanted to like this book but just didn't. I hope that writing this helped the author work through some of his grief but I didn't really see the point other than that. I kept thinking there would be a twist or clue somewhere but there wasn't and, in the end, I was not satisfied.
    • 4/5
      Justin St. Germain's mother was murdered by her 5th husband. At the most basic level, Son of a Gun is a memoir - the author's retelling of the true life events before and after his mother's mother. However, to describe this book as just a "memoir" doesn't seem fair to me. It's also (in my opinion anyhow) the author's way to finally gain some closure and his attempt to make some sense of the events and far as the "why?" of it all and to determine if there was anything he could have done to prevent it.More than anything I felt that the murder left the author questioning his memories of his mother, her past husbands and his life with them. It was very thought provoking to read about his search for something to substantiate those memories. Once you lose a loved one, memories are all you have left of them and to find yourself wondering if all your memories are false......it was heart wrenching and thought provoking to read about. Well written and thought provoking - very happy to have gotten the chance to read this one in advance.
    • 3/5
      I believe this book misses the mark, whatever that is. I anticipated a very different ending. It is extremely well written, but I do not agree that it matchesToby Wolff's genius and I've read and collect everything he's written. The first half of the book moves right along and I could not put it down.. Then Justin starts to visit each of his mother's husbands and the book starts to drag. Then I began to think, "What if Ray didn't kill her? What if the DNA tests show the material under her fingernails wasn't Rays'? Who really killed her? What if the title really means Son of the Gunman who killed her? His real father? Alas, without committing a revealing early warning about what really happens, I was disappointed. In short, the book starts out with a bang, no pun intended, and then fizzles. The continual reflections on Wyatt Earp, in my opinion, add nothing to the story.
    • 4/5
      Brisk and often times, very grim, Justin St. German's memoir, Son of a Gun, explores both the life and death of his mother at the hands of her fifth husband. In September of 2001, Debbie St. German was found dead in her trailer outside of Thombstone, Arizona. For her son, Justin, his wayward life will never be the same. This memoir describes Justin's exploration of his mother's life as well as her final days. As readers, we see Justin interview his mother's past husbands, retell family stories and trace his mother's final moments at the crime scene. As readers, we also feel his restlessness and his emptiness, but somehow, it seems he does find peace at the end of his travels and thus the end of his book.