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The many lives of Mama Love : memoir of lying, stealing, writing, and healing
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2024
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Summary
"Once you start reading, be prepared, because you won't want to stop." --Oprah Winfrey

OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * New York Times bestselling author Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter in this harrowing, hilarious, no-holds-barred memoir.

No one expects the police to knock on the door of the million-dollar two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors' credit cards.

Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She finds that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies . Furniture is made from tampon boxes, and Snickers bars are currency. But Lara quickly learns the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder and acquires the nickname "Mama Love," showing that jailhouse politics aren't that different from the PTA meetings she used to attend.

When she's released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she's legally co-opting other people's identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with the Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her. Shame is a poison worse than heroin--there is no way to detox. Lara must learn how to forgive herself and others, navigate life as a felon on probation, and prove to herself that she is more good than bad, among other essential lessons.

The Many Lives of Mama Love is a heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that makes it almost impossible for us to move beyond the worst thing we have ever done.
Trade Reviews
Publishers Weekly Review
A suburban mom weathers addiction, jail, and parole in this roller-coaster debut memoir. Hardin's account opens in 2008 as she and her then-husband smoke heroin beside their three-year-old son, Kaden, in a hotel room paid for with a stolen credit card. Arrested and sentenced to a year in county jail in Santa Cruz, Calif., Hardin became mother hen to the women of cellblock G, dispensing advice and drugs and polishing her literary chops by ghostwriting fellow inmates' pleas to the authorities. The real struggle began when she was released in 2009 and struggled to get hired due to her criminal record, kick out her still-using husband, and regain custody of Kaden. Eventually, Hardin found employment at a literary agency; helped write bestsellers, including 2016's Designing Your Life; and obtained audiences with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, and Oprah. Hardin mixes despair and comedy in her evocative prose: "I carefully pick through the bottom-of-purse debris until I find some small brown chips.... I don't know if I'm smoking heroin or food crumbs or lint, but I feel the anxiety slowly leave my chest." This redemption story feels well earned. Agent: Doug Abrams, Idea Architects. (Aug.)
Kirkus Review
A writer and literary agent tells the story of how she overcame addiction, a criminal record, and social ostracism to lovingly embrace her "beautiful mess of a life." As Love Hardin recounts, during adulthood, her love of escape led her to anything--sex, food, Vicodin, and eventually heroin--that could induce self-forgetfulness. By 2008, she was living a double life as a "perfect [suburban] mom" and heroin addict who had bankrupted herself to feed the addiction she shared with her husband. Police arrested her after she used stolen credit cards to rent a hotel room that had the electricity and heat she could not afford at home, and her life quickly descended into further chaos. Separated from her children and newly convicted, she experienced a "tsunami of shame and grief and guilt and loss" that plunged her into suicidal despair. Love Hardin eventually found solidarity with other women who had also lost their children and became a surrogate mother to the "lost girls" who were "desperate for things they [had] no name for." Slowly, the author began the hard fight to regain custody of the children she adored, the self-respect her codependent marriage to a drug addict had destroyed, and the credibility among acquaintances who publicly pilloried her as the "neighbor from hell." Work as a collaborative writer for a media firm brought the author into unexpected contact with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, both of whom helped her develop the self-compassion she needed to understand that she was "a work in progress." As Love Hardin writes, "spending a week listening to Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama alternate between teasing each other for not acting holy enough, and then crying over the profound suffering that is the human experience, changes me." In addition to revealing the struggles of female felons in a misogynist justice system, the author celebrates her own determination to accept herself and begin again. A courageous and inspiring memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
1As Needed for Pain1
2Staycation5
3Cul-de-Sacs and Squad Cars19
4The Sally Port27
5Country Music Hell43
6Makeover55
7Lost Girls69
8Mama Love89
9New Year, New You105
10Roll It Up117
11The Neighbor from Hell135
12Push and Pull157
13Mother's Day171
14All Buses Lead to the Same Place193
15Joint and Several207
16Fucking Google219
17The Four-Minute Mile239
18A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood255
19The Dalai Lama Hates Me265
20Many Lives275
21Real Power287
22The Worst Thing I Have Ever Done299
Acknowledgments305
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