Readalikes: If you enjoyed August's selection . . .

If you liked Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain, then you might also enjoy these books suggested by the author as inspirational to his writing process and by our discussion group members as informative or just plain good.

An interviewer for Barnes and Noble notes that “The New York Times Book Review . . . compared your memoir to The Tender Bar by J.R, Moehringer and Another Bull—Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn. Were these books touchstones for you? What books helped you chart a path to writing a memoir?” St. Germain said, “They were. I have well-thumbed copies of both. I like and admire The Tender Bar — I can't drive by Camelback Mountain in Phoenix without thinking of a particularly great passage from it, which I won't spoil for those who haven't read it — but Nick Flynn's book was probably more of a touchstone, because I first read it before I'd set out to write a memoir, and it helped me understand the possibilities of the form. There were so many others: I must have read a hundred memoirs while I was writing mine. Some memoirs or memoir-ish books that come to mind as particularly influential: Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and In Pharoah's Army, Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, all of Didion's nonfiction, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, and, for obvious reasons, James Ellroy's memoir of his mother's murder, My Dark Places. But maybe the biggest single influence was In Cold Blood, a book you have to reckon with somehow if you're going to write about murder in America.”

Our readers suggested Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture by Michael A. Bellesiles and Townie: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III.

And we suggest the September title, Men We Reaped: A Memoir by Jesmyn Ward, another memoir of young men lost to violence and the grief of the loved ones they leave behind, because of an interesting connection between the two books and authors. In a Publishers Weekly feature article in which PW’s top 10 authors picked their favorite books of 2013, Jesmyn Ward chose Son of a Gun. She said, “I remember that time [just after 9/11] clearly: the whole nation was grieving. I had recently lost my brother, so I spent those days doubly reeling, as did Justin. I know this because Justin and I have talked about our respective experiences. We are bonded in our grief—and in our need to understand it more clearly through our writing. We are both novelists at heart, but we found ourselves compelled to tell these stories.”

August Not Fiction Book Discussions

Son of a Gun: A Memoir by Justin St. Germain takes on large subjects in American culture: gun violence, domestic violence, and the class divide.

St. Germain's mother Debbie was shot to death by her fifth husband, Ray, a former law enforcement officer, while the two were living, out of work and off the grid, in the desert outside of Tombstone, Arizona. Starting with these facts straight from a lurid but all-too-common headline, St. Germain introduces the reader to the independent, competent, complex woman who raised him. Debbie was a former Army paratrooper and small business owner who raised two sons as a single mother. St. Germain says, "She liked horses and men, but's that's not who she was." By telling the story of his life growing up with Debbie, his investigation into her murder, and his own journey through the stages of grief, St. Germain offers a moving tribute to his mother.

In addition to his personal story, St. Germain also tells the story of Tombstone and the mythic gunfight at the OK Corral, deflating the myth and showing how Wyatt Earp's "legacy leads straight to Ray, right down to the mustache and the badge and the belief that a man solves problems with violence." In her New York Times review of the book, Alexandra Fuller says that "St. Germain's bigger story, the one amplified from a tale of personal loss and grief into a parable for our time and our nation, is about a place awash with guns and paranoia, where men and women toil at grueling, thankless jobs and make misguided alliances in a desperate attempt to defend against loneliness." In an interview with Barnes and Noble, St. Germain said, "I set out to tell my mother's story, but along the way I kept running into the unavoidable reality of how common stories like hers are in contemporary America. Which forced me to consider possible reasons for that . . . : our love affair with guns, the egregious and destabilizing class divide, and our acceptance of violence against women and violence more generally, especially as it relates to our ideas about masculinity. On one hand, I didn't feel qualified to tackle those issues directly, and was afraid that approach might overshadow the particular story I was trying t tell. On the other, I do hope her story sheds light on them, because while the blame falls properly on her murderer, those issues certainly contributed to her death, just like they contribute to so many other acts of violence."

Near the end of the book, St. Germain writes, "There are no clues left, no mystery to solve. I know what happened. I just don't know why." Do you think St. Germain has found closure even without full understanding? Does it surprise you that he owns guns in his present life? What does the book's title say about masculinity in American culture? Is there a solution to gun violence and domestic violence in our country? We will consider these questions and more.

We hope you will join the discussion of this Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Award Winner: Tuesday, August 5, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, August 21, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.