Son of a Gun: A Memoir / Justin St. Germain

Author One-on-One: Domenica Ruta and Justin St. Germain

Domenica Ruta was born and raised in Danvers, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of Oberlin College and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Brooklyn. Her debut memoir, With or Without You, was praised by The New York Times Book Review as a "luminous, layered accomplishment."

Domenica Ruta: What would you hope the experience of reading this book would’ve been for your mother?

Justin St. Germain: I would want her to think that it did justice to her, to her story. Justice is a problematic term but I think I wrote pretty overtly to honor her in some way—but also not to make her out to be some kind of saint.

DR: As a reader, we see the way she’s a loving mother in how she gave you everything she could but you also show us the stuff that she doesn’t have to give because she didn’t have it for herself. It’s beautifully done. How do you feel about that today?

JSG: I struggled a lot with the idea that my portrayal of my mother would be the only portrayal that almost everybody would ever get of her. Most readers of this book are not going to have any other context. They’re not going to have met her. They’re not going to know anybody who knew her. But I think in the end, I just had to tell myself, "Look, it’s my portrayal or no portrayal and nobody ever knows she ever existed." I wanted people to be aware of who she was and what her life was like, and then beyond that, reflect on the way we think about murder and violence, especially violence against women.

DR: What writers do you find yourself returning to again and again both, in general, and then more specifically when you were writing Son of a Gun?

JSG: When I had just started writing my book, a friend gave me James Ellroy’s My Dark Places and it just blew up any idea I had of what I was trying to do and of what I could do. I was a fiction writer, and I didn’t really know how to structure a memoir, so I just read a bunch to see how other people went about it: David Shields, Leslie Marmon Silko, Michael Ondaatje, In Cold Blood, which seems obvious, but I think if you write about murder in America in any sort of literary way, you have to reckon with it.