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Title details for The Many Lives of Mama Love by Lara Love Hardin - Available

The Many Lives of Mama Love

A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

by Lara Love Hardin
Lara Love Hardin
Audiobook
1 of 2 copies available
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1 of 2 copies available
"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.

    • Creators

    • Publisher

    • Release date

      August 1, 2023

    • Formats

      • OverDrive Listen audiobook

        • ISBN: 9781797164694
        • File size: 271976 KB
        • Duration: 09:26:36

    • Languages

      • English

    • Reviews

      • Publisher's Weekly

        May 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.

      • BookPage
        In her memoir, Lara Love Hardin puts a human face on painfully personal crimes—like the 32 counts of identity theft she commits against her community in order to fund her drug addiction. The Many Lives of Mama Love grips you as suddenly as any psychological thriller, leaving you breathless as Love Hardin evades the consequences of her crimes until, eventually, there’s nowhere left to run. During her yearlong incarceration, the women Love Hardin meets in cell block G are vastly different from her—a former upper-class soccer mom with a successful business—yet she finds similarities and common ground with her fellow inmates in her struggle with sobriety. The title itself is perfectly apt, encompassing Love Hardin’s status as a devoted mother who fights to remain in her children’s lives as well as the way she provided stability and understanding to younger inmates, who nicknamed her ”Mama Love.”With its behind-the-scenes look into incarceration, The Many Lives of Mama Love provides a largely unknown perspective that is absolutely crucial to understanding our country’s prison system. As she relates her grueling firsthand experiences behind bars, Love Hardin folds in commentary on prison reform that is compelling, persuasive and timely. Her journey through the most tumultuous years of her life—from her harrowing time locked away to her release; from the desperate attempts to maintain her freedom and parental rights to her rise as one of the most successful ghostwriters on the literary scene—is the embodiment of endurance and fortitude. The vulnerability and authenticity of her story is only rivaled by her portrayal of the hard-fought self-awareness that comes from finally facing oneself. 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 gritty and inspiring chronicle. 

    Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

    subjects

    Languages

    • English

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