Justin St. Germain’s Son of a Gun: A Memoir is both an intimate portrait of the murder of the author's mother, and a wider look at gun violence in America.
Growing up in Tombstone, Arizona, a town whose tourist economy is built around a thirty-second gun fight at the OK Corral, sets the theme of this work. With so many guns around, both in Arizona and our nation, we “solve” our problems by gun violence - both in the OK Corral and the trailer where St. Germain's mother lived with her fifth husband.
St. Germain asks the question, many times, of why his mother was murdered. What drove her husband to kill her when everything seemed fine, not great but not dangerious, to those who knew them?
It is interesting that he never broaches the question of his mother as the victim of domestic abuse. She had experienced it with other men. Her last husband appears to have engaged in typically abusive behavior. He kept her isolated from the people she knew. Toward the end of her life, the two were always together, living out in the desert. He gave her love and affection, and withheld it; it was all she had. In the final few weeks of her murder, she had unexplained, or poorly explained, injuries. Ray gained her trust and love,took it away and gave it to draw her in to his orbit, to isolate and hurt her. In the end, when she rebelled, perhaps, he killed her.
St. Germain hints at this scnario, but never embraces it; perhaps it is too painful, given all that happened in his family. Yet for a book that wants to explore her murder, it is a strange omission.
Growing up in Tombstone, Arizona, a town whose tourist economy is built around a thirty-second gun fight at the OK Corral, sets the theme of this work. With so many guns around, both in Arizona and our nation, we “solve” our problems by gun violence - both in the OK Corral and the trailer where St. Germain's mother lived with her fifth husband.
St. Germain asks the question, many times, of why his mother was murdered. What drove her husband to kill her when everything seemed fine, not great but not dangerious, to those who knew them?
It is interesting that he never broaches the question of his mother as the victim of domestic abuse. She had experienced it with other men. Her last husband appears to have engaged in typically abusive behavior. He kept her isolated from the people she knew. Toward the end of her life, the two were always together, living out in the desert. He gave her love and affection, and withheld it; it was all she had. In the final few weeks of her murder, she had unexplained, or poorly explained, injuries. Ray gained her trust and love,took it away and gave it to draw her in to his orbit, to isolate and hurt her. In the end, when she rebelled, perhaps, he killed her.
St. Germain hints at this scnario, but never embraces it; perhaps it is too painful, given all that happened in his family. Yet for a book that wants to explore her murder, it is a strange omission.
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