Book ~ "The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing and Healing" (2024) Lara Love Hardin

From Goodreads ~ 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 jail is a class system with a power structure 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. She must learn 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.

This memoir follows the author's life from addiction and crime to recovery and a successful writing career. At first, she appears to have a stable suburban life as a wife and mother but behind the scenes she is struggling with heroin addiction. As her addiction worsens, she begins stealing from friends and neighbours to support it. Eventually, she is arrested, convicted of multiple felonies and sentenced to jail. 

While incarcerated, Hardin earns the nickname "Mama Love" because she becomes a source of comfort and encouragement for the other women around her. After her release, she faces the difficult task of rebuilding her life. She works to stay sober, reconnect with her children and family, complete probation and find employment despite having a criminal record. Over time, Hardin builds a new career as a ghostwriter, helping others tell their stories before deciding to share her own. 

I like reading memoirs and bios/autobios and this one sounded interesting. And it was. It was the author's apparent account of becoming addicted to drugs, doing whatever she had to support that habit and the consequences of those actions ... getting arrested, losing her children, spending time in jail and having to rebuild her life from nothing.

While I applaud how far the author has come, it was annoying to read how frustrated she was with all the hoops she had to jump through with the judicial system to try to rebuild her build her life. I didn't feel all that sorry for her. She knew what she was doing when she started using drugs and eventually stealing. No one forced her. So she should expect to accept the consequences. It didn't seem to me that she took responsibility for her actions. She used her crappy childhood as an excuse. Most of us have crappy childhoods but we don't become drug addicts and steal from our friends and neighbours. 

When she was arrested, she spent time in jail and detoxed. Pretty well the first thing she did when she was bailed out was get stoned with her husband, who had also been arrested. I wasn't feeling a lot of sympathy for her. Not only was she getting readdicted to drugs but she was risking losing her children for good (she's lucky she never got caught). As a mother, I think her first responsibility was to ensure her children are taken care of and she neglected to do that. She was more concerned with doing all she could to get high rather than keeping her children safe.

As a head's up, there is swearing and descriptions of drug use.