From the driver’s seat of her Tesla, Lara Love Hardin took a steady look at a house on a sun-bleached cul-de-sac in Aptos, California, and recounted the afternoon in November 2008 when she was handcuffed and dragged out the front door by a deputy sheriff who told her she didn’t deserve to be a mother.
“This whole street was packed with probably 10 sheriff’s cars. The neighbors were all here,” said Hardin, now 56. That day ended a long-term drug addiction that cost her six years of sobriety and custody of her four sons, ages 3, 13, 16, and 17. Hardin’s second husband was also arrested; their toddler went to emergency foster care.
“There was no more magical thinking,” she said. “There was no more, ‘I can talk my way out of this, I can make up a story.’ It was just over.”
Before her catastrophic nosedive, Hardin owned a pet cemetery. She is now a literary agent and ghostwriter who has contributed to several bestsellers, including those of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. She represents Stanford professors. She had lunch with Oprah.
Most people would struggle to make such a dramatic pivot; if it appeared in a novel, an editor might label it unrealistic. Hardin instead wrote a memoir, “The Many Lives of Mama Love,” which explains in heartfelt, humorous prose how she built a bridge from her old life to her current one. The book will be published by Simon & Schuster on August 1.
The neighbors who had seen her arrested that day were the parents of her son’s friends, who had brought food when her youngest son was born. They were also her first victims. Hardin had stolen a checkbook, credit cards, gift cards, mail, and painkillers from their homes, copied their Wi-Fi while gambling and smoking heroin, and appropriated one of their social security numbers to apply for an Amazon card which she then used to buy a Kindle and parenting books. She’d also searched a hotel room and cars, looking for anything that might fund her next fix.
“It was just survival mode. If I didn’t have the drugs, I’d die,” Hardin said.
During a 90-minute tour of her crime scene — it was only her second visit to her old home since her arrest — Hardin recalled the kindergarten teacher asking why she was lurking in a far corner of the parking lot: “I think she knew.
She pointed to the window of what had been her boys’ playroom and the yard where they played basketball and soaked in a hot tub. She talked about trick-or-treating in the cul-de-sac, how proud she’d been of her blue accent wall and carpeting in the master bath.
Her regret and remorse loomed the day, firm as redwoods.
Growing up in the Boston suburbs, Hardin said, “I was the kid in the apartment, the poor kid with the single mom.” After a childhood of refuge in books, she was the first person in her family to attend college. She fled to the University of California, Santa Cruz, and then to UC Irvine, where she earned an MFA
Here’s what they don’t teach you in high school: If you charge $500 in groceries to a stolen card, and you realize you forgot milk, the second transaction counts as a separate crime. Hardin pleaded guilty to 32 felonies and faced 27 years in prison. Thanks to a plea deal, she spent 10 months in the county jail, a figure the sheriff’s office couldn’t confirm because, according to an information officer, California law prohibits the disclosure of criminal histories of people no longer in custody.
Promotional copy for Hardin’s memoir promises an upbeat-sounding account of “her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to prison caller.” But parked outside the Santa Cruz County Jail, a grim octagonal building where she attempted to take her own life, the view was decidedly more “Law & Order” than “Real Housewives.” Even the rosebushes Hardin once earned the privilege of pruning looked beaten. Green signs bolted to walls and fences warned, “Unauthorized communication with prisoners is unlawful.”
Hardin survived the incarceration by making her voice heard. She started writing – essays, poems and short stories, plus legal and personal correspondence for fellow inmates. “I’m afraid I might get in trouble for pretending to be other people,” she writes of this fuss, which earned her the nickname Mama Love. “I don’t yet realize that what I’m doing is sharpening my empathy – the superpower of all great ghostwriters.”
But the hardest part was yet to come. After Hardin served her time, she found out how difficult it was to find a job and housing when she had to check a box that indicated she had a criminal record.
“There are over two million people in prison right now who believe they are paying for their crimes,” Hardin said in a 2019 TEDx Talk. “What many of them don’t realize is that they will pay for those crimes for the rest of their lives.”
The same week Hardin applied for food stamps, she got a job as a part-time assistant at Idea Architects, a literary firm founded by Doug Abrams, who represents Tutu and Mandela. He never checked her references.
“I resolve that if asked, I will reveal my background, but if not, I will not voluntarily give the information,” Hardin writes. “It’s a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy that I believe still conflicts with my rigorous honesty policy.”
Abrams said he felt Hardin had “gone through some tough times” but was immediately impressed by her talent. At the suggestion of a friend, he searched for her name online. An article in the Santa Cruz Sentinel described Hardin and her second husband as the “neighbors from hell,” he found.
“Here’s someone I just hired to help me run the business and do the banking and accounting,” Abrams said. He worked from a home office; his children were on the property; he was (understandably) concerned.
Abrams called Cynthia Chase, the director of the return program Hardin completed before leaving prison.
“Doug said, ‘Can you guarantee she won’t relapse?’ I said no. Anyone who says yes is lying; that’s not how recovery works,” Chase said in a phone interview. She is now Hardin’s partner in the Gemma Project, a nonprofit that helps incarcerated women reintegrate back into society. “What I can tell you is that Lara, unlike the average person on the street, has so much more to lose.”
After a “dark night of the soul,” Abrams kept Hardin on the payroll for 12 years, a decision he considers one of the best he’s ever made. She eventually became the co-CEO.
He said, “Her identity theft was also her identity translation superpower. She could get someone’s voice, mind and soul on the page in a very powerful way.
Anthony Ray Hinton worked with Hardin on “The Sun Does Shine,” his bestselling Oprah-endorsed memoir about the decades he spent in Alabama before three murders he didn’t commit.
“I felt so comfortable telling Lara things I’ve never told anyone,” he said in a phone interview. “Every time I cried, Lara would stop and say, ‘Wait a minute. Let’s pause for a moment.’ She didn’t rush me to come back. I knew then that this is a gentle soul.
After writing 12 books for other people — 11 of them men — Hardin still wasn’t sure she was ready to tell her own story. She said, “Shame is so tacky. I was so used to keeping my secret.”
After her TEDx Talk, Abrams encouraged her to get started on a proposal, which he sold in a quintuple auction that ended in the top six figures. She used part of the advance to pay more than $15,000 in restitution for her crimes.
In early 2022, Hardin rented a house in Thailand where she wrote a draft of the memoir in seven weeks. She said, “While I was writing the darkest chapters, the thunder shook the villa.” She appreciated the symbolism.
When Hardin sent the manuscript to Eamon Dolan, her editor at Simon & Schuster, he pointed out that “I Wonder” appeared 43 times.
“It wasn’t me who focused on what I was going to say. It was hedging,” Hardin said. “I dove back in.”
In a telephone interview, Dolan continued, “I don’t want a memoir to be the vehicle by which an author invents himself, and it often is. Lara had largely figured herself out. She didn’t hold back. She pushes herself harder than almost anyone I know in my personal and professional life.
“The Many Lives of Mama Love” contains notes from “Wild,” “Orange is the New Black,” and “Catch Me if You Can.” Hardin delves into her troubled childhood (her earliest memory is of her mother banging her own head against a wall); two failed marriages; the escalation of her addiction from opiates to valium to heroin; and her determination to rebuild a stable home for her sons, all four of whom lived with her first husband until she got back on her feet.
She also addresses the Twister-like demands of the criminal justice system. For example, the terms of her discharge required her to be on a drug court and a job release program at the same time. This was challenging even for someone with a car (albeit one that struggled with hills).
“I came from a privileged place, being a white woman, being middle class, getting an education,” Hardin said. “It was still almost impossible not to be sent back to prison. You are ready to fail at every turn.
In a phone interview, Hardin’s son Ty Love, now 27, recalled the first time he visited his mother after she was arrested — “the windowpane, the orange jumpsuit, the phone on the wall” — saying, “I remember her putting on a brave face for us.”
Reading his mother’s book brought him back to that difficult time, Love said, but “it was also healing because I saw my mother’s perspective. I was glad to see her using herself a little more as a bright spot. She is definitely one of my heroes.”
As Hardin drove across a bridge into downtown Santa Cruz, she said she still dreams of her children being taken from her. Pointing to a house on a hill on the other side of the San Lorenzo River, she said, “I remember being in prison and looking up there. I just wanted to be someone who lives in a house.”
Now she’s doing it again. Hardin is married to her third-time-a-charm husband. She doesn’t do drugs. And last year she opened her own agency. It’s called True Literary.
“I chose the name because I like true stories that you wouldn’t believe if they were fiction,” Hardin said. “And because I want to do what’s true for me.”