Date: May 12, 2025
Author: Lara Love Hardin
Title: The Many Lives Of Mama Love
Bravo! Well done! I commend you for your bravery in this share. I would like to say your admissions of these dark days from your past are reminiscent of taking a 5th step on steroids.
This memoir will serve as an inspiration to many a reader. The way you described how you roared through peoples lives like a tornado (per the Big Book) only to completely turn your life around and help others by giving their voice words on paper.
You didn’t really talk about recovery much except in telling of how you met the dude that you later smoked heroine with. I’m assuming this last bout of sobriety and clean time was because of recovery? Though the writing was not clear if I am correct or not.
You tell this tale in a way people who’ve faced addiction can sympathize with. Therefore, they will be able to relate to much of your story. The part about addiction and incarceration and the struggles to break free of the recidivism rate. They will relate to that part. The part about becoming a successful author and lunching with Oprah? Not so much.
As many of you may know or read in my previous writings that I too am intimately familiar with the disease of addiction and have a very similar history. I love that Mz. Love Hardin started her story when she was young. Her first addiction: escape. She wrote of first achieving this through reading. I too did the same. I couldn’t run away in my physical body, but in my mind I was leagues far and away across the sea.
As I read on I realized how eerily similar our two stories are. Except I’m from the school of the hard knocks so it took me finding myself at the brink of death, more times than even twice, before I found my way home.