Justin St. Germain

In the tradition of Tobias Wolff, James Ellroy, and Mary Karr, a brave and unforgettable memoir of a mother-son relationship that is also an unflinching account of a murder and its aftermath.

Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain’s killing in her remote trailer, apparently at the hands of her fifth husband, is a passing curiosity in the local community. But for her twenty- year-old son, Justin St. Germain, the tragedy marks the line that separates his world into before and after. Years later, he is pulled back to the desert landscape of his childhood on a search to make sense of the unfathomable. What made his mother, an ex-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 until finally she found herself in a desperate and deteriorating situation, living on an isolated patch of land with an unstable ex-cop? Justin decides to confront people from his past and delves 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.

“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. All of these make Son of a Gun compelling and vivid.”

–Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and The Testament of Mary

“Intelligent and compassionate at every step, Justin St. Germain stares down his troubled Tombstone boyhood, from shooting cap guns in the shadow of the OK Corral to piecing together his murdered mother’s final moments. A searing story bravely told.”

–Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Battleborn

“At the same time Justin St. Germain tells us a very specific story of loss, he writes about larger issues that engendered and colored that loss: masculinity, violence, parenthood, love, and grief. It’s 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, author of Salvage the Bones, winner of the National Book Award

“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

Bio

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 and teaches at the University of New Mexico.