How this rich blonde mother from a posh suburb became the HEROIN ADDICT FROM HELL
In 2008 Lara Love was outed by her local newspaper in California as ‘the neighbour from hell’. The blonde ‘soccer mom’ from a posh suburb where houses cost a million dollars had been stealing from everyone. She started by taking cheques from mailboxes, then progressed to pinching painkillers from bathrooms at dinner parties. Another tactic was to hang around the car park at the Montessori nursery school where rich mothers left their cars unlocked (she should know, her son was enrolled there).
In this propulsive memoir, Love alludes to a grim family back story involving multiple addictions, domestic violence and non-existent parenting (her siblings once cut off their stepfather’s finger with the lawn mower and then danced for joy). No wonder little Lara turned out to be a spectacularly bad picker of men. Her most recent husband DJ was a mortgage broker turned enabler who thought nothing of injecting heroin into Love’s IV as she lies in hospital recovering from a drug-induced infection. He tells her he is taking care of her and, sadder, she believes him.
Eventually Love is arrested for checking into a luxury hotel with a stolen credit card (the electricity has been cut off at home and this is the only way of keeping her baby son warm). Her final act as a free woman is scavenging brown flakes from the lining of her handbag in the hope of one last hit. At 41, having never previously been in trouble with the law, she pleads guilty to 32 felonies and faces 27 years’ incarceration.
A plea deal eventually reduces Love’s sentence to 10 months, much to the fury of her neighbours who think she should be banged up for life and turn up in the courtroom to say so. At Santa Cruz’s women’s prison, violence is endemic and Lara Love – a name which everyone finds snigger-worthy – is like a lamb to the slaughter. Early on, Love makes a noose from her bedsheets but dozes off before she can do the deed because she is detoxing from the drugs that have got her into this hellhole. Distraught at yet another failure, she starts using again. On one occasion when she is allowed out for a court appearance, she comes back to the jail with a condom full of the painkiller Vicodin, heroin and two needles stuffed inside her body. It makes sitting down uncomfortable, but it also makes Lara Love, aka prisoner S32179, very popular.
This is all gripping stuff, so it feels mean to report that once Love finally accepts responsibility for her behaviour, the narrative loses pace. Managing to quit drugs for good, she finds a sense of purpose in helping fellow inmates write letters to the authorities begging for a second chance (that postgraduate degree in creative writing is finally paying off ).
On release, Love carries on as a ghostwriter, helping Archbishop Desmond Tutu draft his latest book on forgiveness, which becomes a New York Times best-seller. But by the time Love finds herself in Tibet meditating with the Dalai Lama and lunching in New York with Oprah Winfrey, who tells her she what a great writer she is, it all starts to feel a bit anodyne. No one could begrudge Lara Love Hardin her hardearned happy ending, but it is her descent into ‘the neighbour from hell’ that really grips.