The Motherload
Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood
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4.3 • 44 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“A long overdue reality check.” —Oprah Daily
“Honest, unapologetic, and brutally funny.” —Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter
A Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by Oprah Daily, Town & Country, and Brit + Co
Belletrist Book Club Pick
The Times (London) Book of the Week
An unflinching motherhood memoir that dares to ask what happens when “what to expect when you’re expecting” turns out to be months of rage, anguish, brain fog, and a total surrender of sex, career, and identity.
“The kid was objectively a tiny worm, even worse, a worm with my nose.” Welcome to Sarah Hoover’s candid and propulsive take on motherhood where she turns the ecstatic narrative women have been fed—one of immediate connection to your child followed by a joyful path of maternal discovery—on its head.
Like most of us, Sarah Hoover grew up imagining a certain life for herself, and when she moved from Indiana to New York City to study art history, the life she’d imagined began falling into place. She got her degree in art history, landed a job in a gallery, made friends, and met interesting artists, one of whom became her husband. But when Hoover got pregnant, everything in her life began to unravel.
She felt like an imposter in her own body. She grew distant from her friends and husband. Anxiety, fear, guilt, and shame threatened to swallow her. She also experienced trauma at the hands of one of her doctors—a stark trigger. And when her son was born, there was no… joy.
Her despair was persistent, even with help, therapy, and pills. Grieving a lost identity and angry at the world around her, she found herself despising her baby, her husband, and herself. She was afraid it might not end. With the help of a doctor’s diagnosis, Hoover began to understand the cluster of symptoms that informed her experience—she was drowning in postpartum depression—and that she wasn’t a bad mother or a failed woman.
At its core, The Motherload is about learning to forgive yourself. It’s a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect being. And it’s an honest, propulsive, and often funny take on the vicissitudes of marriage, life, and parenting—a motherhood memoir unlike any other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her fiercely candid if somewhat familiar debut, Hoover recounts escaping Midwestern suburbia for the New York City art world, only to crash under the weight of postpartum depression. In 2009, Hoover was working as a Manhattan gallery assistant when she met and began a flirtation with "New York famous" artist Tom Sachs. After they wed five years later, she believed "marriage would corral him into loving me the way I wanted to be loved." However, Hoover's 2017 pregnancy only exacerbated her worries about Tom's infidelities, as well as ongoing tensions with her mother, an attorney turned restaurateur who put business over child-rearing. Worst of all, when Hoover first saw her newborn, she "found him so ugly, with all my worst traits: weird eyes and big ears, a mini-replica of my own self-loathing." Hoover is admirably frank about her difficult behavior—including drinking, drug use, and angry outbursts—noting with bracing candor that her "mental breakdown... exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool," a condition she overcame through therapy and medication. Unfortunately, her cultural critiques ("Birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I'd been fed, and it felt like a nasty trick") lack originality. While not without its virtues, this has little staying power. Agents: Sabrina Taitz, WME.
Customer Reviews
You won’t be able to put it down
Finished it in a day. Very compelling / engaging / provocative and just fun to read! Excellent ratios of glamour: gore : gossip: guidance. Loved it!