The Book Prize Index

Shot in the Heart

Mikal Gilmore

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."

Memoir & AutobiographyMemoir & Autobiography · medium confidenceMemoir & Autobiography81 signalsLlm Classifier: Memoir & Autobiography -> Memoir & AutobiographyOpen Library: Biography & Autobiography -> Memoir & AutobiographyOpen Library: Biography & Autobiography -> BiographyMemoir & Personal HistoryLiterary Biography

Award History

2 wins · 2 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
Los Angeles Times Book Prize for BiographyMajor1994WinnerSecondary source
National Book Critics Circle Award for BiographyMajor1994WinnerSecondary source
View all award history (2)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact. Automated checks have flagged this profile for extra review.

  1. 01 Central figures

    • Mikal Gilmore78%
    Show lower-confidence suggestions

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Gary Gilmore62%
    • Norman Mailer35%

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    No argument inferred with sufficient confidence.

    This suggestion did not meet the normal display threshold and is more likely to be wrong.

    Mikal Gilmore presents their family’s dysfunction—rooted in multigenerational child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder—as the source of Gary Gilmore’s campaign for death and execution.

    Model confidence 46%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    35 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 58%.