Excerpt from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"It's the Graham curse," she said. (John Waters would have loved my grandmother.)

Floating above them all in my grandmother's canon was Saint Bette Davis. When Davis's daughter wrote My Mother's Keeper in 1985, a Mommie Dearest–style memoir, my grandmother was as indignant as if the book had been written about her.

"What a disgraceful, ungrateful child, telling all her family's secrets for money," she said (writing this sentence, I nod uncomfortably) and was moved enough to write Davis a fan letter pledging her support through this difficult time.

You could also find my grandmother burrowing into a stack of murder mysteries from her Book-of-the-Month Club along with True Crime or Official Detective magazines she purchased at the local news stand. The magazines, printed on a ground stock paper with a buxom woman falling out of her tube top on the cover, were anthologies of murders or burglaries committed across the country, most of which involved rapes or bludgeonings from jealous lovers. When the Night Stalker serial killer crimes gripped Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, my grandmother ordered a small pistol that shot mini tear gas cartridges from one of the companies that advertised in the magazine. She kept it under her pillow next to a crucifix.

Years later, when it came time to sort through my grandmother's possessions, in her "valuables" drawer was the gun (never fired), a tub of talcum dusting powder calcified into a brittle chalk, and a crisp thank-you note with the letters BD in a royal blue art deco font, a handwritten expression of gratitude from Bette Davis for my grandmother's fan letter. To me now, these things are my grandmother.

• • •

If my Grandma June was a factory steam whistle calling me to work and my grandfather Emilio a whisper to be ignored, my mother was a siren whose songs were her stories.

"You almost weren't born," my mother says. I'm watching her, wide-eyed, expectant, an eight-year-old perched on her bed mouthing words I know by heart.

"You were on a date?" I ask.

"Yes," she says.

"And then you got in a fight with the guy who brought you to a park in his car?"

"It was a lovers' lane," she says.

"What's that?"

"It's where men take women to talk them into something. I didn't want to talk that night."

"And then you left the car and another guy showed up?"

"He was very handsome," my mother says. "He pulled alongside me and asked if I was okay. 'Let me drive you home,' he said. He seemed like a gentleman."

"You got in?" I ask.

"He was a real fox," my mother says. "Really hot for a white guy."

"Then what happened?"

"He drove further into the woods. Deeper and deeper, like he was looking for something. All he told me was his name. 'I'm Ted,' he said."

"And then?" I ask.

"Ted found some kind of clearing, stopped the car, turned off the headlights, got out, and opened the trunk. I looked behind me and saw he was holding something. Silver, like a pipe. I didn't know what to do."

"Then what happened?"

"These bikers—Hells Angels—roared up and shouted, 'What's going on?' He ran off into the woods, and one of the bikers gave me a ride back home. They saved my life."

"And then?" I ask, edging up on my mother's bed like a puppy. She smiles, cocking her eyebrows as if she'd forgotten we were talking at all.

"And then?" I ask, about to explode.

"Then I saw his face on TV. His name was Ted Bundy."

"Wow!" I'd say. "Ted Bundy!"

"They won't execute him until he loses his looks," she says. ­"Bundy's adaptable; he's a Sagittarius. Not a strong Aries, like me. Or Hitler. But if Ted Bundy had killed me that night," my mother says, "I'd have never been able to meet your father and have you."

Excerpted from Take This Man by Brando Skyhorse. Copyright © 2014 by Brando Skyhorse. Excerpted by permission of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.