Mistakes to Run With

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A devastatingly frank memoir that tears open the past to examine how circumstances—and the choices we make—dictate the people we become, for fans of Educated and The Glass Castle.Mistakes to Run With chronicles the turbulent life of Yasuko Thanh, from early childhood in the closest thing Victoria, BC, has to a slum to teen years as a sex worker and, finally, to her emergence as an award-winning author. As a child, Thanh embraced evangelical religion, only to rebel against it and her equally rigid parents, cutting herself, smoking, and shoplifting. At fifteen, the honour-roll runaway develops a taste for drugs and alcohol. After a stint in jail at sixteen, feeling utterly abandoned by her family, school, and society, Thanh meets the man who would become her pimp and falls in love.The next chapter of her life takes Thanh to the streets of Vancouver, where she endures beatings, arrests, crack cocaine,...