The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing by Lara Love Hardin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I struggle to rate memoirs because obviously each person’s story is their own. So, in this case the issue is not her life but the way she chose to share it with us.
The description of “The Many Lives of Mama Love” feels very different from what the book actually was. “Jailhouse shot caller” seems a bit dramatic.
The early chapters of the book were quite interesting. It began to get flat and boring to me as the book went on. There was a startling absence of introspection. I thought we would have gotten some sort of evaluation about how she ended up where she was, what may have led her to make the choices she made. There was none of that. Almost no discussion of her life prior to her arrest. In the prologue she thanks a new found family and then notes that is a subject for another book. That instantly made me roll my eyes. This might have been a more interesting story if she had talked about aspects of her family – new and old and how all of that contributed to all that she became.
Her ability to rise above her mistakes was indeed admirable but the last at least 1/3 of the book felt like she was name dropping to convince us and maybe herself that she had truly moved beyond the woman who was initially arrested. She did, at least, succeed in convincing me to download one of the books she had written about a wrongly convicted man.
I did appreciate Love Hardin’s attempts to highlight some of the issues within the criminal justice system and the ways it is set up to keep inmates from being able to reintegrate into society. However, many times she seemed to take a victim position without owning all she did to end up where she was and all the privilege she had (someone to look after her kids, education, mother-in-law with money, access to an attorney, relatively low sentence, etc) even in her lowest moments.
Overall, though “The Many Lives of Mama Love” was relatively well written, I found it flat and boring and truly felt like a wasted opportunity to explore the many facets of addiction and ultimately redemption.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read an advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review.
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