The Many Lives of Mama Love (Oprah's Book Club): A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

by Lara Love Hardin

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

With one of those narrative voices that makes you forget you're even reading, The Many Lives of Mama Love is the story of one woman's perseverance through the many heads of adversity. It's inspirational, hilarious and necessary.

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668069608
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	02/27/2024
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	6,226
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Lara Love Hardin is a literary agent, author, and president of True Literary. Prior to founding True Literary, she was the co-CEO of Idea Architects. She has an MFA in creative writing and is a five-time New York Times bestselling collaborative writer, including the #1 bestseller Designing Your Life and the 2018 Oprah’s Book Club pick The Sun Does Shine, which she coauthored with Anthony Ray Hinton. She lives in La Selva Beach, California.

Editorial Reviews

"Heartfelt, humor-tinged prose...The Many Lives of Mama Love contains notes of Wild, Orange is the New Black, and Catch me if you Can. —The New York Times

"A courageous and inspiring memoir." —Kirkus Reviews

“Grips you as suddenly as any psychological thriller... Readers will experience the lows and highs of addiction, incarceration and rehabilitation as Love Hardin assembles the pieces of her shattered life into something beautiful again in this inspiring chronicle.” —BookPage

“A hilarious and heartbreaking confession that will not let you go until it is done—and then it will haunt you. It will give you hope in what is possible for each of us if we allow others—and ourselves—to move beyond our shame, find redemption, and write a new, more inspiring story of our lives.” —Lori Gottlieb, author of the New York Times bestseller, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

“The Many Lives of Mama Love is a masterclass in perseverance. This brilliant memoir is a reminder and inspiration that sometimes the only way out of suffering is to go straight through it. This book will leave you inspired and empowered to reveal your own most authentic self.” —Rich Roll, bestselling author of Finding Ultra and host of The Rich Roll Podcast

“Laced with penetrating wit, written with unsparing honesty and manifesting irrepressible resilience, The Many Lives of Mama Love is a book to intrigue, enchant, instruct, entertain and inspire readers of all ages and backgrounds. It speaks to our common human experience of suffering and the healing that can follow.” —Gabor Maté M.D., author of the New York Times bestseller, The Myth of Normal

“Start this thrilling, heartrending, funny book, and you won’t stop. I couldn’t. From page one, I was swept into Hardin's remarkable, un-put-down-able, artfully told story of suffering and redemption. This book can help anyone who’s struggled and felt hopelessness (and who hasn’t?). shows that not only can we survive the bleakest times, but we can thrive in them and because of them. ” —David Sheff, author of #1 New York Times bestseller, Beautiful Boy

“A compelling and timely rebuttal to the perverse and unjust notion that people who are convicted of crimes can only be criminals. This critically important idea is essential for a nation that has been so derailed by destructive “law and order” narratives that have left us both less just and less safe.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of the New York Times bestseller Just Mercy

“Hardin reveals who we truly are deep inside: infinite souls of limitless possibility. We are far more than the sum of what we have done and not done, what we have and do not have. In her profound, moving memoir, Hardin is honest, courageous, and challenges us to exceed the limiting definition we impose on ourselves and one another. We all can be redeemed.” —Dr. Lisa Miller, psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Spiritual Child

“This book will make you laugh, cry, and realize that everyone deserves a chance and, sometimes more than one. A powerful, poignant memoir filled with grace, enlightenment and love.” —Dr. James Doty, author of the New York Times bestseller, Into The Magic Shop

“Lara Love Hardin writes with the same humor and bravery that helped her navigate incarceration, sobriety and a daunting return to the community to regain her place in her children's lives. This beautifully told story flies in the face of assumptions about substance use disorder and incarcerated women and shows how community and connection help people rebuild themselves for the better.” —Piper Kerman, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Orange is the New Black

From the Publisher

05/22/2023

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.)

Publishers Weekly

A hilarious and heartbreaking confession that will not let you go until it is done.”

New York Times bestselling author Lori Gottlieb

2023-04-18
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.

Kirkus Reviews