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 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 8 Summary: “Mama Love”
Hardin no longer loves DJ and is increasingly frustrated by his angry outbursts in court. She recounts their meeting in recovery and their shared vision for a healthy life without drugs. However, DJ relapsed into using heroin, leaving Hardin to care for her children and his while running their jointly owned pet cemetery business. His betrayal in returning to drug use tore apart their young marriage. Despite her outrage and feelings of superiority, Hardin admits that she was also taking pills at the time and would have failed a recovery drug test. She comforted herself by acknowledging that she didn’t drink alcohol, like the other PTA moms. When, in recovery again, DJ demanded a urine test from Hardin, she stole the dog’s urine and the test came out clean, making her feel virtuous.
In the present, Hardin and DJ share a police van back to jail, and DJ slips her a note containing meth. He’s using in jail even though she got clean in the six weeks she’s been inside. She recalls the first time she tried heroin, stolen from DJ’s gym bag, and its devastating effect on her life: “Those little baggies made me lose everyone I loved” (96). In G Block, she trades the drugs for supplies to write to her sons and then helps Daddy, the G Block boss, which earns her a private room. She gets street credit, works her way to the top tier, and soon controls the block. She starts to write a young adult novel from jail and earns the moniker Mama Love because she helps the young inmates and new arrivals.
Chapter 9 Summary: “New Year, New You”
Still in jail by January and awaiting bail or sentencing, Hardin is now the de facto leader of G block but laments spending the holidays without her children. She recalls her children disliking their stepmother, Darcy Love, whom she also dislikes. Inspired by The Power of Now, she replaces using drugs with meditating, which is another search for a high.
Bored one day, the inmates hatch a plan for the pregnant inmate, Leah, to fake labor pains in order to lure paramedics in for a show. When Leah is sent to the hospital, the inmates call their drug dealers and send them to the hospital to see Leah, who will ferry the drugs back to G block. That night, they are awoken and led to a holding cage while their cell is inspected. When they return, it’s been trashed as punishment for the prank.
Later, Hardin tries to use DJ’s inmate number to make a call, but it’s been discontinued. He’s been bailed out. Angrily, she lays awake and looks for someone or something to blame. She recounts all the trials in her life, the unfair disadvantages, the early deaths of her siblings, her dad running off, her absent mother, and her husband cheating on her. She blames herself for not being able to break the cycle of dysfunction in which she was raised: “I vowed to be the mom I never had, but she and I tend out to be the same. Absent. Gone” (116).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Roll It Up”
Hardin’s public defender, Elisabeth, says she is nearing a plea deal. Hardin recalls dating the assistant prosecutor, who is 10 years her senior, many years prior, when he was married and she was in college. His wife is in the probation court, and Hardin worries she’ll be judged unfairly because of this.
A new arrival named Princess shifts the sleeping situation, and Hardin is paired with Kiki. Princess brings meth, and the block goes on a bender, though Hardin stays clean. After two and a half months, Hardin’s mother-in-law, Carol Jackson, pays her $250,000 bail, and the inmates help Hardin pack up. After her release, she finds DJ standing outside with his mother’s car. They set up at her house, where Hardin admits that she cheated on DJ.
She meets her public defender, who says that her neighbors, Bryan’s new wife, and others are all pressuring him to put Hardin in prison. She is advised to plead guilty to all 32 felonies in exchange for one year and probation plus restitution. She reads the restitution list and feels cheated and wronged, though this irony is lost on her, considering that she faces a maximum sentence of 27 years. She’s told that she and DJ must both accept the plea, but DJ doesn’t want to.
DJ gets heroin and then steals a needle from a hospital. Without protesting, Hardin allows him to inject heroin into her veins, forgetting that her own brother died this way and that this is exactly what could land her in jail for the next 20 years, make her lose custody of her children, or end in her death.
Chapters 8-10 Analysis
In G Block, Hardin continues her back and forth between blaming herself and blaming everything and everyone else, highlighting Addiction as a Lifelong Struggle. She solidifies her persona as an unreliable narrator, eliding her post-recovery observations with the version of her still living through the effects of her addiction. Continuously bouncing between justifications and taking responsibility, Hardin plays out the conflicting thoughts, feelings, and urges that characterize addiction. Her choice to use heroin again after a detox seems at odds with every conscious resolution she has made to be a better person and mother. She does not try to elicit sympathy or understanding, instead highlighting her frustrating powerlessness against the addiction.
Despite this, she excels in G Block, maneuvering her way to the top, gaining the leader’s favor, and easily securing contraband. This highlights the theme of Understanding the Criminal Justice System. She describes herself as a con artist in her element and leverages her higher level of education and socioeconomic class to bring her status in prison. Hardin remains aware of her privilege compared to the other inmates. In Chapter 10, as Hardin awaits her sentencing, an inmate notes that if Hardin wasn’t “a white woman, [she]’d get prison for sure” (118). Hardin follows up this observation by recalling Mimi, a Latina inmate who was sentenced to four years for using her company’s credit card for personal expenses, which Hardin describes as “more or less the same crime” that Hardin committed (118). This moment of false equivalency shows a blind spot in Hardin’s awareness of her privilege. She is emphasizing the injustice of Mimi’s sentence, but unless their cases contain other similarities that Hardin does not mention, her 32 felonies far outweigh the crime of credit card embezzlement.
Hardin is friends with everyone, earning the name Mama Love. The name is thematic because her core wound is the absence of mother love during her childhood. She blames her mother for abandoning (and therefore rejecting) her while she suffered abuse from her father and stepfather. In a moment of painful insight, she realizes that her son may love literature for the same reason she did as a child: It allows him to escape a troubled home. She blames much of her mental anguish on her childhood and her mother while acknowledging that her actions are setting her own children up for troubled lives.
In these chapters, Hardin demonstrates that recovery from addiction is not a linear process: Sobriety can lead to relapses, and one bad decision can erase months or years of progress. Her self-pity wrestles with the desire to take accountability. She blames her first heroin addiction on DJ when she is the one who stole the heroin from his gym bag. She repeats this process when she lets DJ inject her with liquid heroin, which is more dangerous than smoking black tar heroin because it can quickly lead to an overdose. Her brother died from a heroin overdose when she was young, and even this knowledge cannot stop her from making a decision she knows is wrong.
