The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing

Laura Love Hardin (born 1967) is a New York Times best-selling co-author and owner of the literary agency True Literary. Her memoir The Many Lives of Mama Love openly discusses her personal journey grappling with addiction. Through her writing, she explores the challenges and complexities associated with overcoming substance abuse, including ruining relationships and carrying out illegal and unethical activities to get drugs. Her work contributes to a broader conversation about the impact of substance abuse on individuals and society and the US’s ongoing opioid crisis.

Hardin structures her memoir as a redemption narrative. This narrative arc typically involves a character’s journey from a state of moral decline, failure, or wrongdoing to a path of self-improvement, moral growth, and, ultimately, redemption. This narrative structure explores the protagonist’s efforts to overcome their flaws or past misdeeds, seek forgiveness, and achieve transformation. Using a first-person narrative voice helps to communicate the protagonist’s inner struggles, contradictions, and self-reflection. Hardin’s narrative voice commits to openness and authenticity, even when it paints the author-protagonist in an unflattering light. This includes Hardin’s portrayal of herself as an unreliable narrator. On her journey to sobriety, she tells many lies to herself and others and often acts in ways that contradict her professed love for her family and her desire to get clean.