A review by bexellency
The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing by Lara Love Hardin

2.0

Not a winner for me.  My favorite part was the real life descriptions of the impossible puzzle of navigating the system and accessing services.  Beyond that, I know I’m supposed to like the story of redemption, but it didn’t excite me.  Perhaps the fall from grace didn’t seem that dramatic, since the story picks up in the addiction era and since the references to earlier times before that are mostly to an unhappy childhood; it lacked the happy PTA mom set up the promotion blurbs foreshadowed.  Or maybe, what I did see of those days seemed unhappy, too, a desperate keeping up with the Joneses era.  Perhaps the improbable coincidences of the redemption made it harder to believe; the work she finds and the people she meets too tidy a fit for real life.  Overall, the books read very plodding and repetitive to me in the first half so that by the second half, I was unengaged.  Perhaps I’m just not the right audience for a story of restorative justice, which is easier to support in theory than in practice; the part of me that still feels the effect of my experience as the victim of a crime committed by an addict perhaps could only manage indifference as to where the story went.