The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing by Lara Love Hardin

The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing by Lara Love Hardin 

320 pages

Published August 2023 by Simon and Schuster

Publisher's Summary: 

No one expects the police to knock on 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 learns 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 finds the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the “shot caller,” 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, prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more.

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.

My Thoughts: 

I can't remember where I first heard about this book or what it was that appealed to me about it. I do know that by the time it became available at the library, I had already forgotten and was expecting something completely different when I picked it up. As has become my habit, I didn't look at the summary on the book and just launched into it. 

What Didn't Work For Me: 

• I finished this book a few weeks ago and what I might not have liked about this one has faded from my mind. Perhaps the only thing is that, toward the end, there is a fairly long bit about an encounter Hardin had (which I'm not going to get into because the encounter itself is really amazing) that I thought went on a bit longer than needed. 

What I Liked: 

• It's probable that I wanted to read this book because it's about an addict in recovery. Given how closely addiction has impacted my family, it's a subject I'm always interested in reading about and a subject I really wish people would read more widely about. 
• Love Hardin is an educated, white, suburban woman - not the stereotype of a drug addict and I'm grateful that she is shedding light on the fact that addiction can happen to anyone, anywhere. She makes no excuses for the things she did while she was in active addiction and doesn't cast blame on anyone else for her addiction. She does explain the things that lead her to use in the first place, how she came to be of a mindset that allowed her to justify it, and how others played a part in her drug use but she always makes it clear that her drug use was a result of an addiction which was greater than her ability to break out of it. 
• If you read or watched Orange Is The New Black, you saw that people in jails/prisons aren't universally bad people. Love Hardin introduces us to the people she met in jail, showing them to be women who are largely there due to the circumstances of life. Most of the women she knew in jail were resourceful, supportive, and caught up in a system that doesn't work. Many of them were addicts coming in and our prison system doesn't stop that; many others become addicts while they are incarcerated. 
• This might be the best look at how difficult it is to get your life back in order after your release from jail/prison that I've read. You're required to have a job but you have so many court required appointments that it's almost impossible to hold onto one...assuming you can get one with a prison records. You're required to have a home address to get a job but you can't find a home without any money which you can't get because you don't have a job. You have to distance yourself from the people who could drag you back down but those people are often the only people you can turn to when you need help. 
• Love Hardin was certainly aided in her ability to turn her life around by her educational background and finding good people who were willing to help. She knows she was blessed to find those people and to have reached the level of success she has now reached in her life. Now she is giving back, trying to help others. 

Would I Recommend This Book: 

• Absolutely. For anyone who wants to expand their knowledge of addiction or our penal system or for those who love a good survival story. It's well written, very personal, and very honest. 
• Book clubs will find a lot to discuss in this book. One thing I'd hope they would look at is the way they might react to finding out someone like Love Hardin lives in their neighborhood.