num_pages: 416
description: 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.
language: English
title: Shot in the Heart
titlecomplete: Shot in the Heart
characters: Mikal Gilmore, Gary Gilmore
genres: True Crime, Crime, History, Biography, Memoir, Autobiography, Biography Memoir, Nonfiction, Mystery, Family
ratings_count: 3595
awards: awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Anthony Award
category: Best True Crime, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Hammett Prize, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Los Angeles Times Book Prize
category: Biography, awardedAt: 757411200000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Biography/Autobiography
publisher: Anchor