Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Maybe It's Me: A Memoir

Maybe It's Me: A Memoir

Kelly, Adrian Michael

Paperback

Biographies General

Publisher Price: $19.95

ISBN10: 1770418644
ISBN13: 9781770418646
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: Aug 11 2026
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.73 Width: 5.54 Depth: 8.51
Language: English
A raw and riveting memoir of collapse, recovery, and reinvention

For most of his adult life, Adrian Michael Kelly specialized in failure -- serial, sometimes comic, but also epic failure. Born to a gambling-addicted, compulsively spending mother who left when he was five, and raised by his dad, a haunted and often violent hard-drinking Scot, Kelly learned failure early and learned it remarkably well: how to be small, how to be safe, how to be self-defeating. By the age of 30, he was larking around abroad, trying (and failing) to write like his literary heroes while mired in bad relationships and dead-end work.

On a gray October morning in 1999, thunderously hungover and sick to death of himself, he boarded a train in Zurich bound for Bergamo and entered the initial, terrifying stages of a months-long collapse, less a psychological than a spiritual emergency -- full-bore and loud.

Maybe It's Me recounts what led up to that emergency as well as its aftermath, when Kelly came back to Canada to try to rebuild his life. For a while he did just that, but at the very summit of his hard-won achievements, life and his own folly brought him low again. Chronically unemployed, crippled by hideous back pain, and driven to despair by the mother of all writer's block, he was divorced and nearly homeless at age 47. But along with how to fail, Kelly knew how not to quit, and he set about the process -- long and difficult -- of creating a consequential, good-enough life.

Free of self-pity and beautifully told, Maybe It's Me is for everyone who gets in their own way -- and can still have a laugh about it.

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