Son of a gun
Subtitle: a memoir
By: Justin St. Germain
Edition: Random House Trade paperback ed.
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780812980745
Subjects: Death and burial; Mothers and sons; Murder; Family; Mothers; Children of abused wives; Crimes against; Biography
Description: Tombstone, Arizona, September 2001. Debbie St. Germain&#x2019;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&#x2019;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&#x2019;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&#x2019;s life and death. All the while he tries to be the type of man she would have wanted him to be.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 239-240).