THE MANY LIVES OF MAMA LOVE

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.