Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore

What kind of sicko do I have to be that I've read this book three times? I found it so sad and devastating the first time that I had to run back and repeat the experience, thereby gifting myself with a little thrill of pity and pathos. It must be the German in me.

I've read and reread Fatal Vision and Blind Faith in the same lustful fashion, but at least in those cases the story is coming from Joe McGinniss, and I can hide behind his well-documented fascination and over-identification with the suburban killers and feel like I'm sitting at enough of a distance from the whole thing to not be implicated in the unethical seduction.

I can't hide from the Gilmores, though. Mikal, the baby of the family, tells us the whole horrible story himself, and takes us through his own long, painful process of uncovering the layer after layer of deceit and abuse and waste and tragedy that his family was built on. He was born much later than his brothers and benefited from “second family” syndrome (my made-up term), wherein a horrible parent gets to mess up one family, walk away from it, leave it in disarray, then straighten up and fly right with the second family and get credit for being a swell guy. Except that Gilmore's father stayed with the first family and just worked that aging bad-dad magic on his youngest son.

But the worst of it is that Mikal didn't get that second-family-kid glow about him, that subconscious specialness that comes from being the object of someone's redemption. Instead he got Norman Mailer's intrusion and his brother's insistence on dying and his mother's intractable suffering and the slow dissolution and decay of his entire family. Lucky kid!

Lucky for me, though, sicko that I am, that he became a writer and eventually had the guts to put the whole mess on paper. This isn't one of those memoirs that's really a ploy to get a book contract; it isn't one of those that's really about the writer trying to prove how cool he or she is simply by having gone through something shitty; and it isn't one of those that tries to convince you that the writer's pedestrian life and thoughts are somehow extraordinarily quirky or grievous. It's the real deal: a person struggling with questions of human nature and the wheel of fortune and the sorry truth that some lives have no happy ending, or middle, or start. For this reason, this book has the power of Greek myth to me. Sorry, Marsyas, you seem like a nice guy and all, but we'll be starting the flaying now.

Gilmore approaches the story as a journalist: he researches his family members and their pasts and their religious beliefs in order to present a fuller picture of them and try to understand how they became the people they became and why they treated themselves and others the way they did. That's the value of this book, and what raises it to the level of art. Gilmore writes out of anguish, and his heartbreak is palpable throughout the book, but he has the guts and the grace to search for perspective on his family members and give them to us from their place in the world and not just from their place in his heart.

Read it if you're a sick fuck like me who likes to be reminded that there are no easy answers in life and that your sorry ass better get to dealing with it.