Son of a Gun: A Memoir

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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. show more 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. show less

The Publisher Says: 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 in her remote trailer, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity. “A real-life old West murder mystery,” the local TV announcers intone before the commercial break, 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.

Long after his mother’s death is “solved,” closure still seems missing. Distancing himself from the show more 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, house to house, 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 and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 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.

Brutally honest and beautifully written, Son of a Gun is a brave, unexpected and unforgettable memoir.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've read a goodly number of memoirs about hardscrabble childhoods...The Glass Castle for one, Cockroaches for a memorable other...but I was not entirely sure what to make of this one. Violence against women isn't uncommon, and the domestic violence that led Author St. Germain's mother to her death was part of an established pattern in her life. It seems very likely that she was an adrenaline junkie, a person whose emotional needs are met by the powerful stimulant our brain feeds us when we're afraid.

Seeking out the fear isn't that uncommon a trait. Many of us climb mountains or watch horror films. The author's mother seems to have gotten her high from relationships with abusive men. It's very sad and very dangerous, and in this case lethal.

The enormous trauma of Author St. Germain's upbringing, the immense psychic wound of his mother's murder at the hands of the man she chose to marry, and the...the strangely deficient paperwork trail her murderer's fellow cops present him with when he returns to the scene of the crime a decade on, all left me...flat. I wasn't used up, wrung out, the way I would've been if I'd been sobbing from the awfulness and waste of it all. I was just...flat.

I suspect the reason is that I wasn't fully drawn in to the story. I did not get past the stage of reading where I lost my sense of separateness, of being outside looking in. It's an alchemical thing that happens when I'm reading certain things. I can't identify why it did not occur this time.

I wished that it had; I expected it to because I liked the guy; if I ever met Justin, I'd want to hug him. But I was outside, looking in, and thus not 4-star-giving wrapped up in his story. show less

In September 2001, twenty year-old Justin St. Germain receives news that his mother has been shot and killed in her Tombstone, Arizona trailer. Though evidence and witnesses are scarce, it appears that Debbie St. Germain's death came at the hands of her fifth husband, who quickly vanished, leaving behind Justin and his brother as the family's remains.

After relocating to San Francisco and starting a new life in the years following his mother's murder, Justin soon realizes that he can't simply wish away her death. He revisits Tombstone, where he recognizes that he knows more about Wyatt Earp and the tale that made the town famous than he does about his own mother. Working toward closure, St. Germain meets with men from his mother's past show more and digs into case files, filling in pieces of the stories only half seen from the eyes of a child.

"...sometimes I blame her, too - not Ray, but her - because she chose him in the first place. But what are the right choices? My mother married the first man she loved, had children, tried to make it work, to do what was expected. He left. After that she raised her kids. It cost her her youth, most of her dreams. It meant that when we were gone she had nobody else, nothing to do, nowhere to go. Men took everything from her, finally her life. Now men blame her for dying."

Filled with stark but powerful sentences, Son of a Gun is a memoir both haunting and captivating, tracing the journey from grief to acceptance with self-discovery in between.

Blog: www.rivercityreading.com show less

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 show more 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. show less

Justin St.Germain has put together a gorgeous and gritty memoir of the effects of the life, death and aftermath of his mother’s murder. In this slender volume, St Germain covers a lot a ground. His mother Debbie has married five times, the last to an unstable ex-cop who brutally kills her. He dissects each of the failed marriages. His sense of foreboding increases as each successive marriage deteriorates. He loves his mother and hates his stepfathers. Throughout this searing remembrance of violence and its consequences in Tombstone Arizona, the author weaves the legend of Wyatt Earp and the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. As the grief stricken son seeks to unravel the events of his mother’s death he also finds out in graphic show more detail the gruesome end of his stepfather, the murderer, who commits suicide in the getaway truck.

I enjoyed Mr. St. Germain’s book very much and I will never forget it. The story is so strong and compelling, it is hard to realize that it is a memoir and not a novel. “Son of a Gun” puts me in mind of James Ellroy’s very fine memoir of his quest to find the killer of his murdered mother, “My Dark Places”. According to St. Germain violence begets violence and no good comes of it whether the perpetrator is his killer stepfather or Wyatt Earp who both meet lonely ends. show less