Lara Love Hardin, welcome to Heart of the Matter. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s great to see you and meet you over this podcast. Your story is so incredible. I just want to read one part of the blurb that Oprah Winfrey wrote when she picked your book to be part of her book club. “No one expects the police to knock on the door of the million-dollar two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom, Lara Love Hardin, had been hiding a shady secret. She’s funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbor’s credit cards.” You have written an extraordinary memoir in the story of your life. How did you get to that place where you were that “perfect housewife” who had this terrible secret?
Yeah, I mean, that’s something I spent a long time lying awake at night thinking, “How did I get here,” when I was at my rock bottom, trying to rewrite the past, and why didn’t I go left? Why didn’t I go right? I think if I were to give a short pithy answer to that, I mean, I’ll give the details, but the short pithy answer is I got to that place because I had no ability to ask for help and admit that I wasn’t that perfect suburban cul-de-sac housewife role that I was playing.
You write about your childhood, how you grew up. You write about the fact that you felt unseen and lonely. You came from a family with a history of addiction. We know that that increases the chances that somebody may turn to substances. Tell me about it?
It’s interesting, because I did my whole childhood in about three paragraphs, and I did that on purpose, because I really, one, wanted to make sure I was the only villain in my story. And because people want the formula, A plus B plus C is going to equal this addiction, or alcoholism, or incarceration or whatever, or blowing up your life, whatever it is. But I grew up in a family with a lot of addiction and alcoholism and no language for it. No one talked about it. And it was all about what looked good on the outside. And I grew up very profoundly alone. And books were my escape. The first line of my book is reading was my first addiction, and I really turned to books and writing when I was a child to process my emotions, my experiences. And yeah, I don’t remember a single time where anyone in my family said, “How was your day? Or how are you feeling?”
There was just no language for that. And I thought I could outrun the affliction of my family. I thought I could out educate it, I thought … I moved 3,000, I grew up on the East Coast and when I went to college, I went 3,000 miles away. I went from the East Coast to the West Coast. And I thought I could just, I was too smart to have that happen to me, but I had no real coping skills, honestly.
It’s funny that you write about reading being your first escape or maybe even your first addiction. I felt the exact same way. I think I wrote the exact same thing in my memoir, that that was my first eject button. To escape into these worlds. I was a voracious reader as a kid. I grew up without television actually, so that even all I had were books. And I remember growing up on an army base and there would be one movie theater on the base, and my brother and I taking our quarter allowance every weekend to go see whatever movie that was, because that was also an escape. But looking back, it’s interesting that when you talk about that, because what that’s saying is that, “Now, where I am right now, I need relief from this, so I’m going to go to this other make-believe world.”
And in the make-believe world of books there’s logic to why people do what they do. And so, to me the world was, there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance. I didn’t understand why people … I didn’t understand why my, not even people, my family did what they did and acted the way they acted. And there was sort of this constant chaos. And so books, there’s a plot, there’s character motivation, and there’s a lot of happy endings. And I grew up really believing, and I really believed this for a long time, that everybody else was normal. Everybody else had this perfect family and their mom was waiting with cookies after school. And I was a voyeur in books and in life.
And I remember always, it’s always at dusk. You know at dusk if you’re walking and it’s just getting dark and you see lights on in houses, and you can see, this is going to sound creepy, but I don’t mean it in a creepy way, but you can see into people’s homes and you see them sitting around their table. And I just have this visual, and this sort of looking into other people’s lives and thinking, “They’re happy somehow, and I don’t know how to be that way.” I did that well into adulthood, honestly.
I still like to do that, actually.
Okay, good.
Wonder about people’s lives, not in a creepy way or even an unhealthy way, but just I think in a more, “I see you, I wonder what that’s like.” Did you ever turn to anything other than books to escape yourself as a kid or growing up, or was it not until you were an adult that you started dabbling with substances?
I mean, I really turned to school and I turned to … To cope I turned to pretending is really what it was. I was very good at assimilating into other people’s families and going on vacations with them and having dinner with them. And I learned really early on to be who someone thought I was. But I went straight to college and graduate school, and I like to say I was a late bloomer to my addiction and an overachiever at the same time. And it was really only I was married. I had children. I had three boys in four and a half years right after graduate school. I was married and my husband was, I had such dreams of this perfect family that I’m going to create this, I’m going to do this. I’m going to be the perfect mom. I’m going to have the perfect husband. And my first husband was cheating on me. And I was miserable, and I was really facing this sort of reality that I’m not going to have that happy family. I’m not going to stay in this marriage.
And I remember the first time I took, and this is before the opiate crisis was a crisis. And pain medication, Vicodin specifically was handed out in sample packs. This is mid-’90s. And it was handed out in sample packs everywhere I went, or every childbirth, “Here you go.” Or you have an earache, or, “Here, try these.” I remember so vividly the first time I took one pill, not for physical pain, for emotional pain. And the way that it lit up my brain, it was like, “Oh, I’m better. I’m smarter. I’m funnier. I am happier. I’m able to pretend everything’s okay better. I can fool myself.” And that’s how it started. And then it took two to feel that way, and then it took three. And by the time I switched from … And I was on and off, no one grows up saying, “Dear diary, I hope someday I’m going to be addicted to opiates, or I’m going to have all these things happen.”
But eventually it became not a choice. And the way opiate addiction works and worked for me was that feeling I got from one turned into at the end before I switched to smoking heroin, 60 pills a day, 20 for breakfast, 20 for lunch, 20 at dinner.
What? 20?
20 at a time, and to get that rush of wellbeing. And I was highly functioning. It sounded like it didn’t make me, I wasn’t asleep. I was like, “Yeah, let me volunteer at the private school.” I was really highly functioning. And I remember the first time I took maybe four in a day and I thought, “Oh my gosh, I have a problem. I need help. I can’t do this.” And I went to my husband at the time, and I said, “Look, I’ve taken,” I think it’s really the only time I admitted it out loud. I said, “Look, I took, I don’t know, it was three, four or five of these pills every day.” And I gave them to him and I was like, “Throw them away. This is not what I want to do.” And I remember he didn’t throw them away, he put them in the top of the linen closet. He was a tall man, or he is a tall man. And I clocked where he put them.
And I was like, “Okay, great.” And then I don’t know, a week later I dragged a chair over and climbed up and got them down. And I never said anything to anyone again or admitted it really for a very long time. I tried to stop. I had six years right before I tried smoking heroin.
How did that happen? I mean, that’s such a big leap.
What happened, how it came into even in my radar, and look, I had a brother who died of a heroin overdose, a sister who died, who’s an alcoholic as a teenager who died. And it was something I would never, ever do that. And I had no intellectual understanding about opiates, that my prescription pain medication that they gave me after childbirth was just the same as heroin. I didn’t understand that at the time. But I was in my second marriage and I’d met someone in recovery, my second husband, and he had relapsed, and I didn’t know it, and was smoking heroin. And I found this sort of brown sticky stuff in my house. And I remember calling someone I knew from a 12-step program saying, “What is this thing?” And she said, “Oh, that is heroin.” And it was in that moment, I think it hadn’t been in my proximity. It was never something I would have gone out and looked for. I wouldn’t know where to look for it.
And I remember going, my kids were all in Montessori school, private school. And I remember going, I was going to do this. It was my volunteer day and I was going to do this arts and crafts project. And I remember so clearly being at a stoplight and googling how to smoke heroin. So, I had planned it and googled that and then tried it. And I thought, “Wow, this is easier. This is more efficient.” And it took 11 months from that moment that I googled how to smoke heroin to completely implode my life, my children’s life, lose everything. And until I was arrested-
What happened? Wait, go back. Did your husband know that after you googled, obviously he knew how to smoke heroin?
Yeah, he knew how. I kept it secret from him for a while until … And I had this elaborate … I told these crazy lies that seemed so believable to me. I remember, because I started to lose a lot of weight. And I had one friend who came over and said, “Look, I’m worried about you. I don’t know what’s going on.” And my answer, which I thought was brilliant at the time was, “You know what? I read the book, The Secret, and I manifested myself thin.” Just these kind of crazy. I thought it was a brilliant lie, but-
I manifested myself thin.
Yeah, I was like, “It was The Secret.”
If only it were that easy.
Yeah, I know, if only. But so he was suspicious. It was like we were both secretly using and trying to catch each other and denying that we were in the beginning of that 11 month period. And I remember one time I came home and he said he had a drug test, and I was outraged. Like, “What? I’m the poster girl for recovery.” You think, just lying and defending this secret like my life depended on it, because it felt like it did. And he wanted me to take a drug test, and I was outraged and indignant, and I was like, “Well, I don’t have to go to the bathroom right now. I’m going to go walk the dog.”
And I was out in my cul-de-sac walking the dog, and in my brilliant, again, mind to just protect this secret, no matter what, I’m not proud of this story, but I brought some Tupperware with me and I was like, “Okay, the dog pees every five seconds. I’m going to collect the dog pee.” But it took forever. So, I’m out walking around my neighborhood, collecting, every time my dog lift his leg, collecting it, and then I came back and bulb syringe, and tested the dog’s pee. And I was really in that moment, believed it. I was like, “See.” I was so self-righteous about it, which is just crazy behavior.
But finally we both admitted it and then we started using together. And that was up until the point we were both arrested. And so you go from husband and wife to co-dependents, it’s not good. It’s not a good relationship. But as I started to not go to work and my world got small and I started, again, not showing up, I was so invested in keeping the secret and I was not leaving my room and not going to my business. And-
What were you doing? What was your business?
I owned a pet cemetery at the time, believe it or not. Yeah, I had done real estate and then I owned a pet cemetery. And again, I had an MFA in writing, creative writing. And that was really my love. And it’s only when I’m not writing that I started … I didn’t have, that was really how I processed my internal world. And those two things can’t coexist for me. Doing drugs and writing don’t exist at the same time for me. So, books and writing kind of saved me again, which is jumping ahead in the story, but the money, I’d start not going to work. We weren’t running the business. And my husband was a mortgage broker. And then I started stealing from my friends in private school parking lots who would bring their kids into school, and we all leave our purses in the private school, and I would just reach in and grab a credit card or some cash.
And I knew right from wrong. I knew it was wrong. I knew it was against my own moral compass and who I am when I’m not in that state in active addiction. And I had all these ways to justify it, right? “Well, I’m actually not stealing from Deborah. I’m stealing from the credit card company and she can write it off.” I had these sort of moral justifications, I don’t have them now, but at the time that’s how I reconciled the fact, because I knew this is not who I was and who I wanted to be. And I just could not stop and I could not admit it, and I could never ask for help. I remember thinking, “There’s no way on Earth I could spend 30 days away from my children.” This was my-
Meaning, go to rehab?
Go to rehab to get help. And I wanted to stop. And it is so hard, I think for people who have never been in it to reconcile, like, “You know right from wrong, why are you doing this? You know, you love your children, why can’t you stop?” And it’s really hard for people to reconcile, “Yes, I love my children. I would have thrown myself in front of a train to save any one of them or anybody’s child at any moment, but I couldn’t stop using drugs for them.” And it was really, thankfully I was stopped. And some of us are people who have to learn things the hard way, and that was what I needed, and a great gift looking back, it didn’t feel like it at the time, but yeah, I just couldn’t.
It’s like your very survival, my very survival depended on it. I felt like I would die if I did not use. And so I kept saying, “I’ll fix it tomorrow. I’ll figure it out tomorrow. I just have to get through today and then I’ll get my life together and I’ll stop and I’ll go back to the rebuild everything and fix everything.” And then I just ran out of tomorrows.
Did the other moms at the school suspect you were taking their credit cards? No, nobody ever did until, so how did the arrest happen?
Then it turned into my neighbors, and my very close neighbors right next door I stole their checkbook and wrote a check at the grocery store. And that’s really how it fell apart. People probably knew that something was wrong more than they said. I had a friend who said, “Yeah, I just thought you were really sick. I thought maybe you had cancer.” But nobody really talked about it. And I was maintaining, I was outwardly maintaining the life. Even when the police came, they’re like, “Wait, you still have all the things in your house. You haven’t sold everything?” It didn’t look like people expected in the stereotypes of what it’s going to look like if someone’s committing crimes and in active addiction.
When you were arrested, you were charged with 32 felonies, theft, drug possession, bank fraud, falsified signatures, stolen credit cards, you faced up to 27 years in prison. I can’t even fathom before you actually learned what your sentence would be. When confronted with the possibility of 27 years in prison, the mom who couldn’t bear to be away from her kids for 30 days to go to rehab? What was that like?
When I was arrested, my three older boys from my first marriage were all in school. They were in junior high and high school. My youngest son, Kayden, was the only one at home at the time. He was a couple of months away from turning four. And when the police came, I was begging them, “Let me call someone to come pick them up, let me call family, let me call a friend.” And they wouldn’t, they called Child Protective Services and they came to the house, and we’re almost 16 years away from this and it still is emotional for me, because I think about him running up to me, because he’s at that stranger danger age, and he’d never spent away from me. And these strangers come and they’re trying to pull him out of the house and he’s running for me to comfort him. And my hands are handcuffed.
In that moment when I can’t comfort my son because my hands are handcuffed behind my back. And I’m telling them, “These are friends, it’s okay.” And that was the moment where I think everything just broke open. That was a moment where I was like, “Oh, there is no getting out. There’s no story I can tell. The secret to get out of this. This is the reality and I have done this.” And the whole way to jail I’m crying in the back of the police car. And I lived in a place where the police cars didn’t fill up the cul-de-sac and my neighbors were out there, and all I could do was just cry and say, “Where’s my son? What’s happening to him? Where’s he going?” And when I was being brought into the jail, the sheriff’s deputy said, “You’ll never see your son again, and you should not be anyone’s mother.”
And that was the moment where when I believed him, I 100% agreed with him. I mean, I believed him that I would never see my son again or any of my boys when you’re facing 27 years. That was more than me going to prison. It was like, “Wait, I might not see my sons until they’re in their 40s? Like, wait, I couldn’t bear it. And I had a few nights later, because that’s what I believed, and I didn’t know where he was, and I had no will in me. I had no spark in me. I was like, “I can’t get through this.” I’ve gotten through a lot of stuff in life, but I was like, “I can’t bear this. It’s too much.”
And I decided to end my life and I thought it was better. It was really the darkest, it was a very quiet, dark period. I was very calm. I was like, “I just failed at life. There’s no recovery for this. There’s no redemption arc. I don’t deserve a redemption arc. That’s for people who are good, and I’m bad and everyone else has figured out this life.” And I’ve just, there’s no recovering from this I really believed.
And it was a very selfish moment, and I was so lost and I thought might be better off my children to have a mother who was dead than in prison. I really believe that. And luckily, because I was in my failure era, I failed at that. I tried. I fell asleep. It was a miracle, but thank goodness I did. But it was a really, really long road to rebuild from that moment, and I didn’t … One of the hard things is being locked up not knowing your sentence. Because time is weird.
I didn’t know. I was training like, “Okay, if I go to prison, I’m going to do fire camp. I should be a firefighter or am I going to get out?” That limbo. Other women in there had little homemade calendars where they could cross off each day, but when you don’t know how many days to cross off, it is a certain kind of hell I can say, not knowing how it’s going to turn out.
Well, thank God you didn’t get 27 years. You ended up only being sentenced to one year in the Santa Cruz County jail, served 10 months for good behavior, because of the drug court system I’m assuming. Here’s the thing, you say jail saved your life.
Yeah, that was the best thing that could have happened to me.
How is that possible?
I mean, it’s easy to say now in retrospect, like rear-view mirror. But because it stripped away every single identity I had, I was a number in there. I was not a mom. My community hated me. I was not a wife, I was not an employee, I was not a boss. I was nothing. I was a number. And there was a gift in that for me, because it started me on this path to being the real me, who’s not about the look good, who’s not about playing roles, who’s not about shape-shifting to whoever I needed to be, depending on who I was with. Jail is a great place to learn to meditate. If there’s easier ways, there’s courses you can take. But for me, I really had to control my anxiety and my worry and my constant rumination about what’s going to happen in the future, or my rumination about, “How did I get here? Why didn’t I do this? And I should have done that and I could have, I wish I’d never taken that first pill.” I was doing that.
And then someone had left a book Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, in jail, and I read that book over and over and over again. And there’s one sentence in there that’s where you say, “I wonder what my next thought will be.” And you stop your thoughts. And that saved my life, that one sentence at that time.
In this, again, the Oprah description of your fantastic book, “Lara finds that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. Furniture is made from tampon boxes and Snickers bars are currency.”
Yeah, I mean, I never thought about incarcerated women until I became one. In part of my regular life. And now I have a nonprofit that’s helping justice impacted women. Jails are not meant for long-term stays. You don’t have programming, you don’t have in-person visits with your children. And it’s a system that’s built for men and run by men. And when you have a lot of traumatized women. But the women in jail saved me. They were the community I had when everyone else in the outside world had kind of ripped me off. I was a cautionary tale. None of my book club mom friends came to visit me. None of the PTA board friends came to visit me. I was shunned, and I was shunning myself. And there’s a lot of creative women, like artists and designers, and there’s a lot of, it was like a big support. Detoxing in jail is not fun.
And those women took care of me, and then I took care of the next woman that came in. And one of the things, the power structure is what it is. I think anyone in a community or you go through something together, you bond together and you form a family. And I was young then compared to now, but my best friend in jail was 19, my oldest son was 17. There was a lot of young women. In many ways I was the elder there, but I had not been in and out of jail my whole life. This was my first time. And so, my ability to adapt and assimilate helped me there. But the main thing was I stopped using drugs in there and I became me again. And I started writing, because I had a master’s degree in creative writing. I started writing again for the first time in over a decade. And I became a ghostwriter in jail, basically.
I would listen to the women and write letters to the judge as them to help them get long-term treatment instead of prison, or get a pass. And it was great to be writing again. But even more than that, I felt like I was doing good. That was the beginning of a over a decade long quest to prove my goodness to the world. But I felt like I had value again at a time when I didn’t have it out in the world in all the courtrooms I was going to.
You have started this nonprofit to help women who are getting out of jail. What was it like for you getting out of jail? How was that? You said none of the old pals of yours, the book club moms ever came to visit you in jail. When you got out, was there any support system, anybody there to help you?
I got out. I was jobless, homeless, carless, friendless without my children. I had this ticking clock. I had a year to get my son back from Child Protective Services, and I did 10 months in jail. And a lot of times, and it depends by state and county, women have a year, depending on the age of their child to get their child back, but they’re sentenced to 18 months and it’s just impossible. I really did as much as I could. But I when I was in there, we would have a goodbye party for someone leaving. They always left full of hope and good intentions. “I’m going to go back to school, I’m going to break up with my drug dealer boyfriend. I’m going to move home. I’m going to get a job. I’m never going to do drugs again.” And then a week later they would be rearrested and back in jail.
And I remember thinking, “Oh my gosh, how?” And I’m not proud of this. I was like, “How stupid are they? How could they do this?” I didn’t understand how they came back so soon until I got out and realized how easy it is to go back to jail, how everything is set up, these barriers and obstacles for reentry. How easy it is to go back to jail, never committing a crime again and never doing a drug again. It’s still, you’re walking this sort of crazy tightrope. I always say it’s like walking a tightrope in high heels in a windstorm. That’s what every day on probation feels like. While I was in jail, I did this program called the Gemma Program, and it was kind of a life skills, but it was like, I love to learn, I love school. And so we got to leave and there were volunteers. And when I got out, I had no friends, but I would walk, and I had no car. And I remember walking to the Gemma Program offices because I’d be like, “Oh, this is where people aren’t going to judge me.”
I dyed my hair brown when I got out. I hid. It’s super isolating. Even when I got my son back and he’s in first grade, if you think about it, I couldn’t really make friends because I didn’t want to reveal my past. And so another mom would be like, “Oh, my son loves hanging out with your son, Kayden. We should have them together for a play date.” And it would be this panic, because I would be like, “Oh, that would be wonderful, but if you knew me, you might not want your son in my house, or me in my” … It’s very isolating, so full of shame. I’m so full of shame and it’s so hard to do anything when you’re full of shame.
And so, the program I have now is based on that original programming. I co-founded it about a year, started working on a year before the book came out. Because I knew I might have a little big microphone for a little bit. And it is programming while women are in custody, but it’s 18 months with them after they get out. Because I almost went back to jail because I didn’t have transportation. Imagine I was drug testing for three different county agencies in the same county, which means not only-
And you had to get to all those places.
And I had to have a job, but so I’m going to get a job with a criminal record, but one that can let me leave spontaneously up to three times a day on a moment’s notice. It’s almost impossible. All of these sort of, it’s bureaucracy. I think a lot of it is bureaucracy, I don’t think it’s intentional, but it’s a lot of bureaucracy and there’s a lot of illogical consequences that set people up, make it easier. And then that’s without the stigma and shame. I mean, there were times where I was like, I felt like I would be safer back in jail. So, I understood why those women went back.
You actually say in your book, “Shame is a worse poison than heroin.”
Yeah.
That’s pretty powerful.
Because it’s just, it’s so heavy, and it affects everything. You can’t, there’s no room for creativity. If you’re in shame, you’re not going to advocate for yourself if you’re in shame, I certainly didn’t. I could advocate for other people, but I could not advocate for myself. And it’s just isolating. It’s lonely. A lonely, lonely place because you aren’t … I wasn’t, I don’t know why I keep saying you, but I wasn’t … I had no community because I was so afraid. If they know the truth, they’ll run screaming from the room. Right.
You say the real turning point for you was ghost writing, how did you get this job?
I was about two years out of jail and in a 400-square foot apartment with my son trying to get work, I started writing for a SEO blog just to make money for food. And I saw a Craigslist ad to be a part-time personal assistant at a literary agency. And it said the literary agency worked with Desmond Tutu. So I was like, “This is probably a scam. This is not real.” And it was like 25 really elaborate deep questions for this. It was $20 an hour, five hours a week. I was like, “Oh, this will save me.” And so I answered all the questions. There were great writing prompts and I did, I had a don’t ask, don’t tell, like I’m going to answer everything honestly, but I’m not going to volunteer my criminal record if I get asked.
And so I had an interview and I went, there’s a man named Doug Abrams, who used to be an editor at Harper Collins and started a literary agency. And I had my background, a master’s degree in writing. I’d worked at a publisher before in college, small press. I went in for the interview and he was like, “Okay.” I was overqualified in some ways for this, but he took a chance. He hired me, didn’t ask, because it’s not the first thing you think of when you look at me. And I walk in and luckily I had a chance to prove my work ethic and my creativity and my intelligence. But we were working on a book with Desmond Tutu and I started helping an author write their book, a book proposal. And so, it was a few weeks on the job before he googled me.
What made him google you?
Well, we were working on this book called, What Color Is Your Parachute? It’s like a job book.
I remember that book.
So, the agency represents that author and they were updating it and the author said, “Well, now everybody googles their employees.” And I remember that moment, because we were sitting in the office and I was typing away happily. Doug had just told me the day before I was brilliant. And I was all full of like, “Oh, I’m doing good.” And it was like the air changed to the room and I looked up and his face was sheet white, because when I was sentenced, my face was on the front page of the local newspaper calling me the neighbor from hell.
Calling you what?
The neighbor from hell. Said, “Aptos neighbor from hell sentenced.” And it was public humiliation for me, for my children. My son Ty was in junior high. And he said everywhere he went that day, that newspaper was in every classroom. He googled me and saw that headline. And it was really this moment he said, and he’s so trusting and wonderful, I would never, I was so, how do I explain it? I was so thrilled that someone trusted me that I never would have violated that trust. But I was in his home and he had children and his wife is a doctor. So, he went sheet white. And he said, “Go home and come back tomorrow morning. Let me, I never checked your references.” All this kind of hit him. And I went home and I said, “I’m never going back there. That was my dream job working with books again and feeling that someone thinks I’m brilliant, someone thinks I’m so valuable, I’m doing good work in the world.”
And so it took everything I had. Probably the most courageous thing I’ve ever done is to go back that next day. He said, “Look, I checked your references and I got to walk my talk. I can’t be working with Archbishop Desmond Tutu and not walk my talk.” And it was like, “Maybe you don’t handle the finances.” And I was like, “Fair enough.” We did hire someone to do that. So, that was in 2011 when I left to start my own agency in … 12 years later, I was CEO.
Wow.
And I started collaborative writing with a lot of amazing humans. I worked on The Book of Forgiving with Archbishop Desmond Tutu as his writer. I worked on Nelson Mandela’s book. I worked with relationship therapists, I was neuroscientists, like Stanford professors. And it was like I was building my resume of goodness. Because I knew someday the truth would come out for the rest of the world. None of our authors knew, Doug knew. No one else in my life knew.
And I was like, “Someday the truth is going to come out about my past.” And I had so much shame still for so long that I need my resume of goodness to defend my humanity. It was really this thing I was doing. And I was writing New York Times bestsellers and I was part of the team to work on the Book of Joy. I went to India to meditate with the Dalai Lama, really afraid he’s going to read my mind. I was like, oh-
He’s going to google you.
He’s going to know I’m bad. I thought he was going to look in my soul and see I was bad. I carried that with me for so many years until finally I was, I said the thing, I was afraid. I was so ashamed of that newspaper headline. And the only reason I ended up even doing the book is at the end of 2019 I did a local TEDx talk. I had a friend who ran that and she said, came to the office, “And I’m not leaving till you agree to do it.” And I was like, “I’m never going to do that.” And she said, “Trust me.” And so after three hours in my office, I said, “Fine, I’ll do it.” It was in two days. And so I got up and did this TEDx talk and I said, “Here’s the thing. I was once the neighbor from hell, and here’s some other people I have been.”
And talked about my work. And that feeling of just saying the thing out loud that I was so afraid everyone would find out. I lived in so much fear of people googling me. It was the greatest. It’s better than any drug I have ever taken, that feeling of lightness and just like. And people didn’t run screaming from the room. That was the only reason I decided to do the book was like, “Okay, this can help.”
It can help. I just want to read two passages from your memoir, because you’re clearly an incredible writer.
Thank you.
In addition to being a woman with an incredible story and life experience. The first is about what we were talking about at the beginning of this podcast, how you and I both as children turned to books as an escape. Here’s what you wrote, “The truth is, I’ve only ever had one addiction. The white whale of addictions: escape. From as far back as I can remember, there has always been a better place than wherever I am. A better me than whoever I was. Books helped me escape when I was young.” Then you go on to write, “My whole life I had pretended to be a beautiful, happy, shiny person in the hopes that somehow that would make me a beautiful, happy, shiny person. I fit in everywhere, because people love beautiful, happy, shiny people. But the problem with me trying to fit in everywhere is that I have never actually felt like I belonged anywhere, or with anyone.”
That’s the problem when we pretend to be something we’re not. And even after you got out of prison and all those years you were ghost writing and praying nobody would google you, you were pretending to be a woman who hadn’t been addicted to heroin, who hadn’t stolen from her neighbors, who hadn’t been arrested, who hadn’t been a local news celebrity in the worst way possible. And when you’re pretending to be something you’re not, you’re never actually authentically living your own life and authentically connecting with other people. And that’s not good. That’s no way to live.
No. And that’s why I say that jail was the greatest gift. I’m sorry for the collateral damage. No one wants to be their children’s college essay topic, right? But that was-
I can only imagine what your boys have come up with.
Oh my gosh. But I never would have become me. I would have gotten my whole life. I’m more me now than I’ve ever been me. And there’s just so much, there’s so freedom in that. There’s so much. The thing I was afraid of that people would run away. Everyone in the world, I’m sure you get this too, tells you their secrets now because you feel safe to tell their secrets. And one of the gifts too is when my boys were in junior high and high school and college, and even now, there’s nothing, because of what I went through, there’s nothing they’ve not been able to talk to me about. And all their friends. I was that, the last thing I’m going to do is judge anyone. And so, that’s a huge gift. And yeah, there’s so much room for creativity and advocacy and everything else if you’re not in shame and you’re not pretending to be something you’re not, so that’s been a great gift. And if the thing I teach my children is how to fail spectacularly, keep going, great.
Yeah. Well, I think you’ve taught more than your kids that lesson. The book is titled, The Many Lives of Mama Love, which was your name in prison.
Yes.
A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing. I think that’s the best title of a memoir I’ve ever read. And your story is just incredible. And no issues like now in recovery, solid recovery. No urge to take yourself out of the moment with a drink or a substance?
Yeah, it’s interesting, because the healing part of that, it’s hard to measure healing until you’re tested. My memoir ended and the Oprah thing happened. And then for the paperback I did a bonus chapter. Simon & Schuster asked me to do that because my 2024 came in hot. I could have titled the chapter Death Divorce and Oprah, because it’s bad things and good things that can test you that make you uncomfortable. And it was this moment where I was going, I went through another divorce and betrayal and I was like, “Why am I okay?” And it’s because I’ve never gone through hard things with other people as support, letting other people support me and care for me. And that was a big lesson, last year since the book, since the hardback to paperback. And I was like, “Wow, not once did I think of doing drugs.”
Wow.
Not once did it even cross my mind that that’s a solution or a coping skill. It never even crossed my mind. Yeah. So yeah, it was 16 years on March 18th, and what a gift. I have community, now, I grew up in a family where no one talked about emotions. Now I have a feeling and I have 27 people that call and be like, “What is this? I’m having this feeling.”
What is it? Why do I feel this way?
Yeah, what is it?
Let’s talk it out.
Yeah. Which again, is a gift, because I think whatever that thing that afflicted my family, I am very proud of stopping it. I come from a long line of women who kept secrets. And I have four boys. But I like to think that that legacy changed because of what I went through. You have to make the meaning out of the messiness.
Well, the fact, I’m the mom of two boys and we spend a lot of time talking about our feelings. And sometimes it can be hard to hear, especially if they’re feeling mad at me, because I’ve done something really annoying or I’ve hurt them somehow or done something wrong. But it’s really an important life skill. I think a lot of people, I don’t know if it was a generational thing, but I too, I don’t remember talking about my feelings as a kid ever. So, I think that’s why I read books to recognize, “Oh, that’s what that character’s feeling.” And to get that, I don’t know, it’s a really funny thing. And maybe we’re better at it now, or maybe you and I are better at it because we’ve been through addiction and recovery. And where recovery is all about recognizing, “Why did I drink? What was I looking to numb? Why did you do heroin and Percocet? What were you looking to numb and not feel and escape?” And you can’t really recover until you can recognize that and start to talk about all those things.
And yeah, it’s amazing, because I think, looking back now, sometimes I’m thinking about my own villain origin story where I’m like, “Why did I take that pill?” And I was like, “I was depressed. No one talked about mental health.” Maybe I had postpartum depression. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. But that was the only tool I had to cope and make myself feel better. And I have a lot of tools now. And my son, Kayden, my youngest who was taken by Child Protective Services, he’s now at UC San Diego. And it was really that moment I moved him into college and moving him into the dorm. And I went to park my car and really in 12 years of shame and even building my resume of goodness and six New York Times bestsellers. And this, this, this, it was only that moment when I moved him into the dorm where I was like, I exhaled from the first moment of my arrest when he was taken. Because I was like, “Oh, we did it.”
So, it was like that moment where I was like, it was the first time I was like, “I’m actually really proud of … I’m proud him, but I’m really proud of me,” which is-
Good for you.
And I had to let my boys read my book. I never knew my mom’s interior world, so they know all the stuff.
That’s a gift. And it was a gift for me to get to talk to you. Thank you so much, Lara Love Hardin. You’re amazing. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Thank you so much.