New York Times bestselling author Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot-caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter in this “hilarious and heartbreaking” (Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone), no-holds-barred memoir.

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 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 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 with 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 position 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, prove herself that she is more good than bad, and much more.

The Many Lives of Mama Love is a “thrilling, heartrending, funny” (David Sheff, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Boy) 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.

Lara Love Hardin is a literary agent, author, and president of True Literary. Prior to founding True Literary, she was the co-Ceo of Idea Architects. She has an MFA in creative writing and is a four-time New York Times bestselling collaborative writer, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life, and 2018 Oprah Book Club pick, The Sun Does Shine, which she coauthored with Anthony Ray Hinton. In 2019 she won a Christopher Award for her work “affirming the highest values of the human spirit.” In 2019 she was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award and short-listed for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Love Hardin lives in La Selva Beach, California, with her husband, Sam. She has four children, two step-children, five dogs, three cats, twenty-one chickens, and four ducks.