This book is a freight train, and from the very first page I was grateful to be along for the ride. Lara writes so vulnerably about the challenges of being a mom of four, both as a pre-prison thief/addict and then after as a post-prison felon/ghost writer/author/literary agent. It didn't feel like I was reading, instead it felt like I was having an incredible conversation with a close friend. Typically I read a book over a span of a weeks, a little every night. But I tore through The Many Lives of Mama Love in two sittings, desperate to see how it ended. This memoir not only reads like a novel, it reads like a thriller. I laughed, I cried, I cheered. By the way, Oprah agrees with me. She chose The Many Lives of Mama Love as her March, 2024 Book Club pick.
“Once you start reading, be prepared, because you won’t want to stop.” —Oprah Winfrey
OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • New York Times bestselling author Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter in this harrowing, hilarious, no-holds-barred memoir.
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 has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards.
Simply the most original and compelling book I've read this year. Taylor Jenkins Reid creates a time machine that toggles back and forth from the present day to old Hollywood. Because of all the vivid characters and details, I honestly kept forgetting that this is a work of fiction. Although I was rooting for the narrator, I fell in love with Evelyn, which I think is the whole point of the book. Everyone falls in love with her. I especially enjoyed the tabloid healdines/articles that are peppered throughout the book. But beyond that I was struck by how Jenkins Reid serves us an honest, vulnerable queer love story in unexpected packaging.
"If you're looking for a book to take on holiday this summer, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo has got all the glitz and glamour to make it a perfect beach read." -Bustle
From the New York Times bestselling author of Daisy Jones & the Six-an entrancing and "wildly addictive journey of a reclusive Hollywood starlet" (PopSugar) as she reflects on her relentless rise to the top and the risks she took, the loves she lost, and the long-held secrets the public could never imagine.
Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready…
I love how Essie Chambers takes her time and let's you really get to know her characters in this book. You see the world she paints through so many eyes, but it Is though Diamond's that we learn the plight of a Black "girl of size" in a small, all-white town. Diamond is so real that I actually looked up the author to see what they had in common. The book starts out with a mystery that made my heart ache a little. The letters we read reveal family secrets and we become the detectives, examining each clue with hopeful eyes. I savored this book, treating myself with a chapter or two at the end of the day, never wanting it to end.
'I love a novel this much maybe just once or twice a year.' - Curtis Sittenfeld, author of RODHAM and ROMANTIC COMEDY
'Told with warmth and humor by a memorable, irrepressible heroine.' - Rumaan Alam, author of LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND
What if the price of moving forward is losing the only family you've ever known?
Summer, 1987. On the sweltering streets of the dying New England mill town of Swift River, sixteen-year-old Diamond Newbury is desperately lonely. It's been seven years since her father disappeared, and while her mother is determined to move on, Diamond can't distance herself from…
After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—stockpiling pills in her Louboutins and elaborately scheduling her withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins is running out of places to hide.
She has learned the hard way that even her high-profile marriage and Hollywood lifestyle can’t protect her from the pain she’s keeping bottled up inside. Facing divorce, the possibility of a grueling custody battle, and the insistent voice of internalized racism that nags at her as a Black woman in a startlingly white world, Laura wonders just how much more she can take.
Now, with courageous and candid openness, she reveals how she started the long journey towards sobriety, unexpectedly found new love, and dismantled the wall she had built around herself, brick by brick. With its raw, finely crafted, and engaging prose, Stash is “emotionally riveting…usher[ing] in a new way for us to talk and read about the paradoxes of addiction, race, family, class, and gender.” (Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy).
