49 pages • 1 hour read
Lara Love HardinThe Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “As Needed for Pain”
Lara Love Hardin escaped the realities of a traumatic childhood by reading, which she considers her first addiction. Two of her siblings died young, including one from a heroin overdose. Her father and then stepfather abandoned the family, and she was raised by an absent, distracted mother. In high school, Hardin’s teachers recognized her excellence in writing, and she gained validation through her work. She was the first in her family to go to college and selected the University of California, Santa Cruz for its distance from her home in Massachusetts. In the 1980s, Hardin attempted to continue her escapism through sex, drugs, prescription medication, and food, but none of these brought her fulfillment. She tried mushrooms, LSD, and cocaine; slept with her resident adviser; remade her appearance; and tried to start over as a carefree Californian.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Staycation”
The narrative jumps to 2008. Hardin has not showered or eaten in three days when she takes her three-year-old son, Kaden, to a hotel she paid for with a stolen credit card. The electricity is off in their house, and they cannot go home, so she sneaks the dog and as many of their possessions in as possible. Hardin is frantic as the consequences of her crimes begin to add up. She tries to smoke the remnants of black tar heroin off a piece of old, burnt foil she found in her purse but cannot get high. Later, her second husband, DJ Jackson, arrives with more heroin, which he paid for by selling some of their possessions. After getting high and calming down, Hardin calls her ex-husband, Bryan Love, and asks if their three sons can come visit her at the hotel. She tells Bryan she’s back to normal, fine, and on a staycation with Kaden.
In the morning, the hotel calls to say the credit card Hardin used has been reported stolen. She tells Kaden they’re going on a picnic, throws everything in the car, flees, and waits for DJ at a nearby park. There, she reminisces about her life a year ago when she was sober and running a small business. She smokes more heroin in the car to the sounds of children playing in the park and makes plans to return home, mend her life, and reunite with her three older sons.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Cul-De-Sacs and Squad Cars”
With nowhere else to go, they return home. Hardin and DJ awake to the police at the door and quickly hide their drugs. Hardin walks down the stairs thinking about the many times she could have turned her life around but didn’t: She has had every chance to change this outcome, and yet it feels inevitable. She is handcuffed in front of her son while the police search the house. A representative from Child Protective Services (CPS) watches Kaden while Hardin and DJ are interviewed by the police. As Hardin is led outside, Kaden runs to hug her, and they both cry as she is pulled out to the waiting squad cars in front of their assembled neighbors. In this moment, Hardin understands that all of this is her fault.
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Sally Port”
Hardin and DJ are in the back of the squad car when they pass the Montessori school Hardin’s children used to attend. She would take her SUV to the parking lot, wait until the moms went inside with their kids, and then rob all the purses in the unlocked cars of cash and credit cards. Because she was one of the moms, she had access, knew their weak points, and was never suspected.
At the county jail, a cop tells her she’ll never see her son again. This breaks her, and she relents that she is incapable of caring for her children or herself. With her one phone call, she calls her mother, who promptly informs her she can’t afford the $250,000 bail. Her mother explains that a gun was found in their house along with drugs, stolen credit cards, and more. Hardin is charged with neglect, child endangerment, identity theft, fraud, and more, for a total of 32 felony charges.
A drunk driver is tossed in the cell with her, and Hardin sees the woman’s alcohol problem clearly even though she could not see her own life falling apart. She is given clothes, undergoes a cavity search, is led into a women’s jail, and is placed in G Block. She hears a voice and tries to open a door, which throws every woman in the jail into fits of laughter. It’s 2:00 a.m. when she rolls her mat atop a bed and lays down to sleep.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The opening chapters detail Hardin’s transition from a suburban soccer mom happily co-parenting six children to a person struggling with heroin addiction and an inmate in the county jail awaiting sentencing for 32 felony charges. The first-person present-tense narration conveys her internal thought processes, providing an insider’s point of view as events unfold. In the final days before her arrest, Hardin knows she is committing crimes, damaging her relationships with her children, and alienating friends and family. Still, she is trapped in a cycle of heroin use, underscoring the theme of Addiction as a Lifelong Struggle. Hardin neither hides nor justifies the fact of her addiction. Rather, she depicts her process of rationalization: “I couldn’t think about the woman whose card I had used […] In my mind, she had to be someone well off, oblivious to suffering, untouched by heartache or struggle” (11). Because she steals from her own social circle, Hardin knows her victims, though not well. She depersonalizes them to keep her from feeling guilty, but this coping strategy does not last.
These chapters also introduce Hardin’s family dynamics. The narrative skips her marriage to her first husband, Bryan, moving from college in the 1980s straight to 2008 when she is married to DJ and coparents six children: her three teenage sons from her first marriage, DJ’s two children from his first marriage, and Kaden, who is Hardin and DJ’s son. Family is at the heart of Hardin’s priorities, and this introduces the theme of The Power of Blended Families. Later in the memoir, Hardin provides the backstory of her relationship with Bryan, but at this point, the narrative maintains tension by focusing on the days leading up to her arrest.
Hardin uses literary devices to describe her experience without resorting to exposition. For instance, in Chapter 3, she uses personification while trying to rid the house of drugs: “These drugs have lived in our home for almost a year, and like bad houseguests, they have taken over everything. I should have evicted them. Instead, I welcomed them, and now it’s too late” (20). The analogy of drugs to houseguests is also an extended metaphor, and the description imbues the drugs with agency, helping Hardin convey the dynamics of addiction. This narrative voice, capable of conceptualizing the dynamics of drug use in hindsight, signals that the narrator is looking back on events from a future perspective. Despite the immediacy of the first-person present-tense narration, the narrator’s insights show that Hardin has put in the hard work of analyzing her life and accepting her addiction and the harm that it caused. This foreshadows her character arc as a woman who survives the lowest point of her addiction and comes out of the justice system reformed and rehabilitated.
Chapters 3 and 4 introduce the theme of Understanding the Criminal Justice System. From CPS taking Kaden as he tries to cling to Hardin to Hardin’s cavity search upon entering the county jail, Hardin uses syntax and sensory detail to convey the situation’s emotional weight: “He is crying and burrowing his face into my neck. A man and a woman in dark suits are talking to the deputies. Child Protective Services” (25). The sentence fragments show Hardin’s fragmented state of mind, and the detail of “dark suits” creates an ominous tone. Hardin wants to convey the emotional reality of entering the criminal justice system in addition to providing specific details about its operations.
