The Many Lives of Mama Love is a memoir about Lara Love Hardin and tells the story about how she went from being a Silicon Valley mom in a five-bedroom home living a blissful suburban life with her family to becoming addicted to substances that led her to committing acts of theft and fraud. More than anything this is a memoir about redemption and reclamation after the mistakes Lara makes land her in prison and eventually back into the community where she has to navigate life after incarceration and the pressures of probation.

I enjoyed the voice of this memoir. Lara is an editor, author, and comedian and her talent really shines through even as she shares the harrowing and sad details of her journey to and through the prison system. I enjoyed reading the stories of the friendships she ends up making with the women in the local prison; the same women who gave her the nickname Mama Love.

Mama Love uses her talents as a writer to write a short story about the women in her block and via storytelling she begins to help others heal- women who have never seen their stories reflected on the page. Through her gift as a writer and as an empath, Mama Love builds bonds with these women and is able to teach them purpose through her own pain. Lara is so deeply vulnerable and honest in this memoir and shares how not being able to speak the language of grief, loss, or emotions stunted her healing journey. In this memoir she shows us how she reclaimed her own story and her journey back to self and back to her boys.

Thank you so much to the author and publisher for the e-arc copy!

Whew, this is an intense, attention-grabbing memoir. I read it in a single day. Hardin pulls no punches as she vividly lays out her journey with drugs and how it led to her time in jail, and then details her fervent, often frustrating struggle to stay straight, regain custody of her children, and build a career. If you like candid memoirs, you’ll enjoy this ride.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book.

I immediately got into this book and couldn't really stop reading. It's so very well written, very engrossing and just so moving. Primarily though, it's about how we, as a society, dehumanize those who have made mistakes and how we're not willing to see the difference between those who are sorry for their crime and those who are not. I also don't know how it works in other countries, but judging by this book and some others I've read in the past, it sure looks like in the US, the system is simply designed to keep a person in, once they so much as spend a day inside.

Despite that, this book made me genuinely happy - for the author, and the way things turned out for her. It's a sad story, but not a sad book - and it has a happy ending (I'm not spoiling, okay? The author clearly wrote it, so she's fine!)

There is no way you'll be reading this book and not rooting for Mama Love. I dare you. I fell in love with her within the very first pages.

Oh, and unrelated - but I just wanted to say, how funny it is to find out you've read quite a few of the books co-authored by a person and you never knew. Loved them as well. Hilarious.

I thank the publisher for giving me a free copy of the ebook in exchange to my honest review. This has not affected my opinion.