Shot in the Heart

25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die

Browse all of the exceptional memoirs that made our list.

Mikal Gilmore's family history is a ghost that lingers long after you close the cover. His brother Gary's infamous choice to pay an eye for an eye after murdering two young Mormon men was the grain of sand in the oyster that is Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song. The story is about the entire family (four boys, their sad mother, their abusive father) and is sweet and horrific at the same time. A look at Portland, Oregon, in the 1950s and a history of blood-letting complete this intriguing and very American true story. Recommended by Amy

A brilliant, creepy synthesis of family memoir and true crime, Mikal Gilmore’s tale slowly winds its way through his family’s history, from his mother’s Mormon roots and father’s criminal past, to his older siblings’ violent and haunted childhoods in Southeast Portland, to the aftermath of his brother Gary’s notorious execution for murder (memorialized in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song). A profound exploration of the poison at the root of the Gilmore family’s tragedies, Shot in the Heart is a dark and breathtaking attempt to understand why the story ends with a firing squad. Recommended By Rhianna W., Powells.com

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

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.

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 black sheep 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.

"Remarkable, astonishing...Shot in the Heart reads like a combination of Brothers Karamazov and a series of Johnny Cash ballads...chilling, heartbreaking, and alarming." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Mesmerizing...riveting and immensely moving...Shot in the Heart is a gesture of sustained courage that just happens to be a page-turner." Daphne Merkin, The New Yorker

"Mikal Gilmore's triumph is that he pushes his readers beyond being helplessly enthralled witnesses to the point where, with him, we might consider not only that violence and evil do exist within the limits of predictable human behavior, but that there is evidence of another equally mysterious force, which some of us would call grace: the same grace that impelled Mikal Gilmore to take up a pen instead of a gun and to write a very difficult memoir with generosity and compassion. This may not be redemption, but it is better than mere survival." New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison

"Impossible to put down...Shot in the Heart can rightfully be placed alongside the best of this generation's harrowing family memoirs." John Schulian, Los Angeles Times

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER - A murder tale from inside the house where murder is born. 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.

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 black sheep 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 his story 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.

Mikal Gilmore has covered and criticized rock & roll, its culture, and related issues for many national publications. He was 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. His first book, Shot in the Heart, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California.