Shot in the Heart

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song , campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart , he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder tale 'from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave.' Shot in the Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence, and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long lineage of ruin. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot in the Heart exposes and explores a dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.

MIKAL GILMORE is an American writer and music journalist. Born in Portland, Oregon to Frank and Bessie Gilmore, he is the younger brother of famed murderer Gary Gilmore who was the first person executed by firing squad after the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. Mikal was the music editor for the L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and for twenty years has worked on the staff of Rolling Stone, where he has profiled many national figures. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.