I Swear I'll Make It Up to You ─ My Life on the Low Road

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. And 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.