Paul Auster: ‘The gun that killed my grandfather was the same gun that ruined my father’s life’

In this extract from his new book, Bloodbath Nation, the novelist details the chilling murder his family hid for five decades - and why fixing the US's deadly relationship with firearms will take gut-wrenching honesty

• Paul Auster Q&A: The right to own a gun in the US is seen as a kind of holy grail'

I have never owned a gun. Not a real gun, in any case, but for two or three years after emerging from diapers, I walked around with a six-shooter dangling from my hip. I was a Texan, even though I lived in the suburbs outside Newark, New Jersey, for back in the early 50s the wild west was everywhere, and numberless legions of small American boys were proud owners of a cowboy hat and a cheap toy pistol tucked into an imitation leather holster. Occasionally, a roll of percussion caps would be inserted in front of the pistol's hammer to imitate the sound of a real bullet going off whenever we aimed, fired, and eliminated one more bad guy from the world. Most of the time, however, it was sufficient merely to pull the trigger and shout: Bang, bang, you're dead!"

The source of these fantasies was television, a new phenomenon that began reaching large numbers of people precisely at the time of my birth (1947), and because my father happened to own an appliance store that peddled several brands of TVs, I have the distinction of being one of the first people anywhere in the world to have lived with a television set from the day I was born. Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger were the two shows I remember best, but the afternoon programming during my preschool years also featured a daily onslaught of B-westerns from the 30s and early 40s.