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

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 & becomes inmate S32179. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party & Lord of the Flies. Furniture is made from tampon boxes & Snickers bars are currency. But Lara quickly finds the rules & brings love & 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 & getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, & 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 & others, navigate life as a felon on probation, prove to herself that she is more good than bad, & much more.

The Many Lives of Mama Love is a heartbreaking & 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.

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Lara Love Hardin is a literary agent, author, & president of True Literary. Prior to founding True Literary, she was the co-Ceo of Idea Architects.