GARY Gilmore became fixed in the American consciousness when he was executed by a firing squad in Utah for the murder of two men. He was the subject of one of the first true-life novels, Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song, and was played by Tommy Lee Jones in a film of the same name. There was even a punk song, Looking Through Gary Gilmore's Eyes. And that, most people thought, was quite enough.
But now, 17 years on, Gary's younger brother, Mikal, has opened the Gilmore family's innards to public scrutiny once again, finding that the roots of destruction run deep in their history.
Of the four Gilmore brothers, Mikal was the only one who even made an attempt to lead what could be called a normal life. Two died young: one by rifle shots to the heart, the other from festering stab wounds. The third, Frank, ended up a drifter.
Mikal, however, thought he had escaped his background and began work as a music journalist, eventually becoming a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. At the time of his brother's execution - the first in 10 years since the reinstatement of capital punishment - he refused to be interviewed or to join the media circus feeding on Gary Gilmore's refusal to appeal and the plain fact that he actually wanted to die.
But the Gilmore family history was not something that Mikal could put behind him. It kept catching up with him, nudging him, interfering in his life and richly supplying his nightmares. He looked into Gary Gilmore's blue eyes every morning in the shaving mirror, and he came to believe he could only face that look if he tackled his past head on. The result is a book, Shot In The Heart, which explains why the Gilmores were cursed long before the days of The Executioner's Song. It covers the early life of Gary Gilmore, which Mailer was unable to explain because Gilmore's mother, Bessie, answered his questions with riddles and evasions.
''Some of the same dark forces in Gary's life were in mine; we both had been shaped by a longing for family, a longing that broke each of us but in different ways,'' saids Mikal, now 43.