Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

I SWEAR I`LL MAKE IT UP TO YOU

Mishka Shubaly

The Low Road is a memoir of a precocious young man trying to be good and failing (and failing, and failing)—until, one day, he succeeds. Taking a cab home one night after a bar fight, Shubaly decides to run five miles the next morning to retrieve his bike. Thus begins a new, much healthier love affair with running, and eventually a new life.

The Low Road is the master story of Mishka Shubaly's nine lives. A misfit kid in the best of times, Shubaly had his world shattered when, in a 24-hour span in 1992, he survived a mass shooting on his school's campus, then learned that his parents were getting divorced. After the departure of his father, a decorated rocket scientist, his remaining family soon lost their house. Vowing to avenge the wrongs against his mother, Shubaly plunged into a 17-year love affair with alcohol.

In this fiercely honest, emotional book, Shubaly relives the best and worst of these adventures: the disastrous events that fractured his life; his destructive romances; his hot-and-cold career as a rock musician; his travels across the country in search of meaning, drugs, and his family; and the time he met his newborn nephew while tripping on cough syrup.

The Low Road is a memoir of a precocious young man trying to be good and failing (and failing, and failing)—until, one day, he succeeds. Taking a cab home one night after a bar fight, Shubaly decides to run five miles the next morning to retrieve his bike. Thus begins a new, much healthier love affair with running, and eventually a new life. When Shubaly finally reunites with his distant father, he discovers the story of his childhood was radically different from what he'd imagined. Shubaly's muscular prose, big heart, and dark wit inflect this grand story of mistakes, their consequences, and eventual redemption.

Mishka Shubaly writes true stories about drink, drugs, disasters, desire, deception, and their aftermath. He began drinking at 13 and college at 15. At 22, he received the Dean's Fellowship from the Master's Writing Program at Columbia University. Upon receiving his expensive MFA, he promptly moved into a Toyota minivan to tour the country nonstop as a singer-songwriter. At 32, he got sober and shortly thereafter began publishing a string of bestselling Kindle Singles through Amazon. His writing has been praised for its grit, humor, fearlessness, and heart. He lives in Brooklyn, where he is at work on his third solo album.

Available products
Book Published by PublicAffairs
Book Published by PublicAffairs

Comments

We all have heroes. I would never want to imagine Tom Waits going to therapy or Bukowski running a 10k. In my heart, Mishka Shubaly will always be spilled over the bar next to me and playing on the jukebox of my soul.

John Doran wrote about the book in the Guardian, discussing comparisons to Charles Bukowski and praising the memoir as a "great book . . . [Shubaly] casts a forensic eye over the detritus of his life during this two-decade period – the squalid housing, the violence and the transient low-paid work. Despite all this, however, he still found time to work hard at his songwriting craft and at several points it almost looked as though he was going to make it as a musician. But he was a masterly self-saboteur, who wrecked each new opportunity in a haze of scotch, cocaine and painkillers, almost as immediately as it arose." Read more...

There’s no storyteller like Mishka Shubaly—hardcore on every emotional level, he scares the bejeezus out of me, especially when he’s cracking me up. I Swear I’ll Make It Up To You is a brilliantly toxic confession awash in booze, bodily fluids, and the shock of accidentally turning into a human being, against your will.

Here is a young writer fully in possession of an immense talent. His story is about what happens when the dream runs out, when the bank forecloses and the father lights out for the territory. It is a memoir with a mythic dimension—the angry son’s vow to avenge his deserted mother—and a contemporary vocabulary of bad drugs and hard times. I Swear I’ll Make It Up to You explores one of the great unanswered questions of our time: what does it really mean to be a man?