The Other Secret Life of Lara Love Hardin

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Lara Love Hardin’s career as a ghostwriter began in an unlikely place: a women’s jail in Santa Cruz. Ironically enough, it was pretending to be someone else that had gotten Hardin locked up in the first place; she faced 32 felonies, most of which were for identity theft and credit card fraud. In the grips of her addiction to heroin, she had lost sight of who she was. In jail, that became an asset.

Noticing her way with words, a fellow inmate named Jacinda asked Hardin if she could help her write a letter to the court asking to be placed in a long-term residential treatment program. “After Jacinda,” Hardin writes in The Many Lives of Mama Love, “I have a steady job ghostwriting legal letters, love letters, birthday letters, anniversary poems, arguments in family disputes.”

Hardin was so skilled at getting into other people’s heads that some of the other inmates whispered that she must be psychic. “I don’t explain that the reason I can write so accurately about their fears, their shame, their desperation to be loved, to be better mothers than they had, or their struggles to stay clean, is because in all these ways we are exactly the same,” Hardin writes in Mama Love. “I don’t yet realize that what I am doing is honing my empathy—the superpower of all great ghostwriters.”

After jail, Hardin turned that superpower into a legitimate career helping well-known figures tell their own stories. Over the course of her career, she wrote multiple bestsellers, taking on the perspective of everyone from a former Playboy Playmate to a former president of South Africa (yes, that former president of South Africa) to another Oprah’s Book Club author (hint: #79). Read on for a selection of collaboratively written titles, and to learn how Hardin got herself into so many vastly different minds.

Notes to the Future, by Nelson Mandela

This collection of quotes, speeches, and words of wisdom from the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former South African president is, as fellow anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu writes in the introduction, “nothing short of a miracle.” For nearly four decades, quoting Nelson Mandela was a crime punishable by imprisonment in apartheid South Africa. “The fact that Mandela is now one of the most quoted people in the world is an extraordinary turnaround,” Tutu continues, “and a testament to the fact that truth cannot be silenced and wisdom cannot be stopped.”

Drawing from privileged access to Mandela’s private archive, Hardin worked with her boss, Doug Abrams, to “memorialize and thematically tell the story” of this great leader through his own curated quotations. In the back of the book, the Nelson Mandela Foundation Centre of Memory thanks Hardin for her “invaluable assistance in finalizing the selections of quotes you find here.” When Hardin read this acknowledgement, she remembered “specifically thinking this would be something alongside the horrible newspaper headline that my boys could remember me by.” But, in contrast to her arrest, the memory of her contribution to this title would make her sons proud of her, as it had made Hardin proud of herself. “By getting to play my small part in this book,” Hardin says, she felt like she was “part of a greater history of the world.”

Enjoy Every Sandwich, by Lee Lipsenthal, MD

For fans of When Breath Becomes Air, this is a poignant memoir of a doctor facing his own mortality after a terminal esophageal cancer diagnosis and learning to live—and die—with grace, dignity, and unvanquishable joy. This was one of the first books Hardin worked on at Idea Architects, the literary agency where she would eventually become the official in-house collaborative writer. When she first saw the manuscript, however, she was fresh out of jail, unemployed, and eager for a second chance. The book was passed on to her as part of her interview process; her idea for framing the whole book within the day of Lipsenthal’s diagnosis impressed her future boss so much that he offered her the job on the spot.

Though Lipsenthal died in 2011, two months before the book was published, his story is immortalized forever in the pages he wrote with Hardin.

The Book of Forgiving, by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu

Hardin told her boss he was crazy when he first asked her to coauthor a book on forgiveness by the archbishop, a Nobel Peace laureate. At the time, she was on probation, going through a divorce, “hated” by her community, and ashamed of herself. “I don’t know the first thing about forgiveness,” Hardin writes in Mama Love. “I know about forgetting, but nobody is publishing The Book of Forgetting.”

But her boss insisted that she was “the perfect person” to write the book, and eventually, Hardin recognized that he was right. She drew from the experiences of incarcerated women she worked with through the Gemma Project, numerous interviews with Tutu and his daughter, Mpho Tutu, and extensive research to write a “fourfold path to healing ourselves and our world.” Through the process of writing the book and building that path of forgiveness, Hardin found a way out of the maze of resentment she felt for those who had kicked her while she was down—and for herself.

Eight Dates, by John Gottman, PhD, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD

With more than 40 books and a relationship health empire between them, licensed psychologists (and husband and wife!), John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman know a thing or two about falling—and staying—in love. In this book, they guide readers through what Hardin describes as “the eight conversations you should have before you marry someone,” from candid discussions about sex and money to soulful talks about spirituality and dreams for the future. While writing the book, Hardin confessed, “I never had any of these conversations before any of my marriages.” In the years since, she has ensured that all of her sons complete the book’s exercises in their own long-term relationships. Now, that’s some grade-A parenting!

Only Say Good Things, by Crystal Hefner

At just 21, Crystal went to a Halloween party at an (in)famous Los Angeles mansion, where she caught the eye of a man 60 years her senior, who would change her life forever. Hugh Hefner quickly took Crystal into the inner sanctum of the Playboy Mansion, a realm ruled by strict hierarchy, cutthroat competition, and constant surveillance. Hef made Crystal one of his many “girlfriends,” a Playboy centerfold, and, eventually, his wife, caretaker, and, finally, his widow. In this unflinching memoir, the 37-year-old looks back at the misogyny and objectification that dominated her marriage and young adulthood and forges a new life built, for the first time, on her own terms.

Hardin resonated so deeply with Hefner’s story that she “came out of ghostwriting retirement” to ensure that the author “got the literary respect she deserved.” Although their life experiences are vastly different, Hardin identified with Hefner’s “desire to find a home, to feel safe, to belong, and to not feel judged.” She also recognized the way Hefner’s story could put up a mirror not just to her own life but to our broader culture. “Her story has the power to impact millions of women who fall into the toxic trap of being valued by what's on the surface and fitting themselves to molds they didn't create,” says Hardin.

The Man’s Guide to Women, by John Gottman, PhD, and Julie Schwartz Gottman, PhD

Another collaboration between Hardin and the Gottmans, this book draws on 40 years of research into the biological and social differences between the sexes, offering practical guidance to men on how best to love and live with women. “This book was so much fun to write with the Gottmans and their coauthors, Doug and Rachel Abrams. It was meticulously research-based and also had fun cartoons,” explains Hardin, adding that, like Eight Dates, she has made the book required reading for her four sons. She admits that her “favorite way to mortify them” while they were reading was to say, “When you get to the sex chapters, try not to think about the fact that your mom wrote it.”

Becoming Bulletproof, by Evy Poumpouras

Drawing from her work with the New York City Police Department and the security detail for three United States presidents, a former secret service agent shares hard-won wisdom on personal safety, fearlessness, and reading other people’s true intentions.

Despite Poumpouras’s impressive résumé (she’s one of just five women in history to be awarded the Medal of Valor), Hardin had some reservations about working so intimately with someone who had made a career on the other side of the law. “Evy used to pursue and prosecute people like me,” Hardin notes. “When we started working on her book, she kept referring to the ‘bad guys’ she pursued as an investigator and a secret service agent.” Hardin knew intimately what it felt like to be reduced to the worst thing she’d ever done; on top of that she was “terrified” to be keeping the secret of her background from someone who was known as a “human lie detector.” Hardin decided to lay all her cards on the table early, telling Poumpouras about her criminal background and letting her choose whether or not they should work together. Poumpouras was game. “Evy never once judged me for my past (although she did grill me pretty hard),” Hardin says. “Now we share all aspects of our lives and families with each other, and she has become one of my biggest supporters.”

In the book’s acknowledgments, Poumpouras writes, “Lara, this book would not exist were it not for you. Thank you for taking a chance on me. Not only did I get to write a book, but more important, I gained a lifelong friend.”

Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

In this #1 New York Times bestseller, Stanford University design professors apply their knowledge of engineering, product design, and aesthetics to the issue of leading a meaningful life. Growing out of their wildly popular Stanford class, which teaches students “how to use design to figure out what you want to be when you grow up,” this book shows readers how to reframe some of life’s most existential questions as design problems that can be tackled systematically and creatively.

Hardin worked on designing her life while still on probation, her criminal record still drastically curtailing her freedoms. “I am ghostwriting a book for two Stanford professors,” she writes in Mama Love, “but I can’t homeschool my son.” To Hardin, the book’s success felt like “a savings account I use as leverage against other parts of my life that are not as successful.” Her public defender used the book’s success as a more literal form of leverage, bringing up its bestselling status in a probation hearing to show, Hardin interpreted, that she had a “valid job and also prove I’m a valuable member of society now and will not walk away from my debt.” Hardin notes that, unfortunately, “the judge does not seem that impressed.”

Mindsharing, by Lior Zoref

In this bestselling debut, former Microsoft executive and current private crowdsourcing consultant Lior Zoref unveils the hidden wisdom held in our social networks and instructs readers on how best to tap into collective knowledge to “solve problems, make decisions, access creativity, and create more ease and joy in our lives.”

Working on this book was a “powerful lesson” for Hardin on the magic that “comes when a diverse group of people come together to share ideas.” In many ways, Hardin’s own career as a collaborative writer is a testament to this power—it’s hard to think of a more diverse group of people than those Hardin wrote with and for, from the women in G Block to the Dalai Lama!

The Sun Does Shine, by Anthony Ray Hinton

This memoir tells the story of a man who spent nearly 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit. In Mama Love, Hardin writes about channeling her own experience of incarceration into the cowriting of this title: “While almost a year in Santa Cruz County Jail doesn’t compare to 30 years on death row, I know the pain of being alone. I know the sound of a door closing that you have no power to open yourself. I know about being judged. I know Ray before I’ve even met him, and I know that of all the books I’ve worked on, this is the book I was meant to do.”

The Sun Does Shine was the first book Hardin collaborated on that featured her name on the cover as a coauthor—and the first book in the literary agency’s history to be selected as an Oprah’s Book Club pick. “I’ve known Oprah, as you know, for a very long time,” Gayle said during the CBS Mornings announcement. “I have not seen her as excited about a book as she was since The Color Purple.” Oprah confirmed, saying that she wanted to go out to Fifth Avenue with a sandwich board sign and hand out these books to passersby on the street.

In The Many Lives of Mama Love, Hardin recalls watching this segment from the CBS greenroom. When Oprah tells her that she is an “incredible writer,” Hardin feels that her “life is complete.” Little did she know her own memoir would also become a Book Club pick!

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