This month’s LWD Book Club selection is The Many Lives of Mama Love. A heartfelt memoir about addiction, love and perseverance, Lara Love Hardin shares her gripping story with a stunning degree of honesty.
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The Many Lives of Mama Love
by Lara Love Hardin
This book came highly recommended by a friend who lent me her copy and she didn’t steer me wrong! I stayed up into the wee hours of the morning three nights in a row because I just couldn’t put it down. Don’t you just love books like that? “Mama Love” is one of the best books I’ve read in the past five years.
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.
WHAT ARE YOU READING LATELY?
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Other LWD Book Club Selections:
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