"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 —Kirkus Reviews —BookPage —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 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 —David Sheff, author of #1 New York Times bestseller , Beautiful Boy —Bryan Stevenson, author of the New York Times bestseller Just Mercy —Dr. Lisa Miller, psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Spiritual Child —Dr. James Doty, author of the New York Times bestseller, Into The Magic Shop —Piper Kerman, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller, Orange is the New Black
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.)
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
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.
