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 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Country Music Hell”
Hardin adjusts to life in G Block, where music is always playing, and takes in her new world as she worries about Kaden. She finds a pay phone in the block and collect calls her mother again. Her mother informs Hardin the cumulative charges against her add up to 27 years in prison and that people are hurt and angry. She can’t help with bail and doesn’t know where Kaden is.
Hardin is embarrassed, ashamed, and guilty. She fears that she has lost her sons and decides to die by suicide. She quickly learns the guard’s night routine and determines to hang herself using her bed sheet. She believes her death won’t hurt her children because they have already lost her to addiction and jail. She tries to recall when she first took an opiate and remembers finding Percocet in her in-law’s home in 1991. She found relief from anxiety by using the pills and decided to steal more of them to keep the feeling going.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Makeover”
Hardin wakes up in bed and realizes she slept through her suicide plan. She unties the sheet from her neck and plans to try again at night. She is struggling through detox and withdrawals. A guard tells her that she will be in court in 10 minutes, and she hurriedly fixes her hair. A fellow inmate named Kiki uses colored pencils dipped in hot water to rouge her cheeks, and then Hardin is hustled back to the courthouse, where she is informed that she’s awaiting an emergency CPS court session. She sees DJ in the hallway, but they cannot talk as they are led into the courtroom. CPS requests that Kaden be removed from their care, listing drugs, neglect, endangerment, and abandonment. Hardin learns that Bryan has requested custody of Kaden, and relief washes over her. When she is moved to a holding cell, she finally cries and admits, yet again, that this is all her fault.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Lost Girls”
If her heroin habit came from DJ, her comfort with crime stretches back to her youth. At 13, she stole a pair of jeans from her hippie California aunt, Jodee. She stole throughout her youth and eventually graduated to greater cons, identity theft, and credit card fraud.
Back in G Block, she talks about her court appearance, and the women rally behind her, help her to bed, and encourage her to eat. She learns that getting one year to reunify with her son is unlikely. She begins to connect with the other inmates, including having a long conversation with Nina, who was formerly addicted to meth and whose son was also taken by CPS. Daddy, the G block boss, comes to her aid, securing supplies. Hardin describes the female inmates as girls beaten down by an unjust and unfair system and believes them to be innocents who took the fall for men who abandoned them. She describes the jail guards as domestic abusers, keeping them locked up and confined and tormenting them unjustly: “The guards have no idea just how similar they are to the men that landed these women in G block” (79). After several weeks, she knows the routine, the food, the guards, and the inmates and begins to call them family. Kiki gifts her a book titled The Power of Now, and she reads it many times, hoping to escape from her painful past and learn from the book’s wisdom.
She uses the phone to call her eldest son, Dylan, and apologize. This causes her to realize that she should not die by suicide but get better for the sake of her sons. She explains that she was in recovery for six years prior to her relapse in 2008 and had even met DJ in recovery. When she goes to a 12-step program in the jail, she meets Cheryl, a woman Hardin trained when she was working with the county’s Narcotics Anonymous program as a recovered addict. She blames the program for her relapse. Back in the court’s holding cell, she meets Gina, a woman who killed her daughter. She realizes that she and her children are alive and safe, and she takes solace in this.
Chapters 5-7 Analysis
As Hardin adjusts to life in G Block, she shifts between being repentant and self-aware and being selfish and accusatory, highlighting Addiction as a Lifelong Struggle. She blames CPS, the sheriff’s office, and the legal system for stealing her child away from her, rather than admitting that Kaden wasn’t safe with her. She blames Narcotics Anonymous for her failure to adhere to the 12-step program. She blames the men in her life and the drugs for furthering her addiction. At this point, she struggles to take responsibility for her specific actions even though she feels incredibly guilty; in shifting blame, she also fails to recognize how addiction itself has affected her behavior and actions. This lack of consistent perspective mirrors the mood swings, low points, and moments of enlightenment she experiences in detox. Returning to the theme of The Power of Blended Families, it is a conversation with her eldest son, Dylan, and her desire to get custody of Kaden that inspire her to overcome her addiction and take responsibility.
The catalyst for this change is The Power of Now, which takes on symbolic resonance in the memoir. Hardin uses the book almost as a talisman to remind her to take deep breaths and exist in the present moment when her fears about the future spiral out of control. A gift from Kiki, the book also symbolizes Hardin’s bond with the other inmates. She relates to them as a mother and sees them as innocent products of an unjust system and abusive men: “These are the lost girls, the forgotten girls, the girls whose faces wear scars because they picked at them while staying awake for days with their meth dealer boyfriends” (76). Here, Hardin uses pathos to elicit sympathy for her cellmates, many of whom have suffered domestic and sexual abuse and are imprisoned for crimes the men in their lives committed.
In Chapter 5, Hardin describes addiction as “an extreme form of self-obsession” and addicts as “pathologically self-absorbed” (44). This view informs the section’s narrative tone as Hardin describes her own behavior. Though she chronicles her connections with fellow inmates and her desire to reunite with her sons, most of her thoughts revolve around herself. Her guilt is all-encompassing, but at the same time, she complains about the food and water pressure in the jail. Though she is aware of her crimes’ seriousness, she is also indignant that she is being punished for them. Hardin is aware that white privilege and “pretty” privilege have shaped her point of view. She even likens herself to Scarlett O’Hara early in the memoir, mentioning the Gone With the Wind heroine three times, most poignantly, just before her arrest: “Like Scarlett O’Hara at her first ball, I descend the stars slowly. Only I am no debutante and neither of these men are Rhett Butler” (21). Like O’Hara, Hardin sees herself as a tragic heroine of sorts but is self-aware enough to poke fun at this self-dramatization. However, this very self-awareness undercuts some of the immediacy of her first-person present-tense voice in favor of showing that she is a reformed person writing a redemption memoir.
