I Swear I'll Make It Up to You
A Life on the Low Road
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4.1 • 8 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
An odyssey of family, heartbreak, violence, punk rock, brokenness, broke-ness, sex, love, loss, drinking, drinking, drinking, and an unlikely savior: distance running.
A misfit kid at the best of times, Mishka Shubaly had his world shattered when, in a twenty-four-hour span in 1992, he survived a mass shooting on his school's campus, then learned that his parents were getting divorced. His father, a prominent rocket scientist, abandoned the family and their home was lost to foreclosure. Shubaly swore to avenge the wrongs against his mother, but instead plunged into a magnificently toxic love affair with alcohol.
Almost two decades later, Shubaly's life changed again when a fateful five-mile run after a bar fight inspired him to clean up his life. And when he finally reconnected with his estranged father, he discovered the story of his childhood was radically different from what he thought he knew.
In this fiercely honest, emotional, and self-laceratingly witty book, Shubaly relives his mistakes, misfortunes, and infrequent good decisions: the disastrous events that fractured his life; his incendiary romances; his hot-and-cold career as a rock musician; meeting his newborn nephew while out of his gourd on cough syrup. I Swear I'll Make It Up to You is an apology for choices Shubaly never thought he'd live long enough to regret, a journey so far down the low road that it took him years of running to claw his way back.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this memoir of darkness and redemption, singer/songwriter Shubaly describes his virulent romance with alcohol and his struggle to escape the toxic embrace by way of long-distance running. When Shubaly was 16 his father abandoned the family, condemning his wife and children to poverty. Shubaly plunged into a cycle of binges and blackout drunks while stumbling through miserable jobs, toxic relationships, a fiction M.F.A. at Columbia, and a fruitless music career in New York City. A chance run to retrieve a stranded bicycle led to a new obsession, one that allowed him to negotiate a truce with his demons. While Shubaly certainly doesn't lack for powerful material most notably his experience of a mass-shooting at Simon's Rock he profusion of tragedies tends to diminish their impact. His dark humor and mordant self-flagellation save the episodic narrative from monotony. Out of a cast of hundreds, only Shubaly's father becomes a three-dimensional figure and their troubled relationship provides an emotional focus to the book.
