“ The Motherload is for all the women who wish someone had told them the truth about
motherhood. Honest unapologetic and brutally funny…it’s about developing the strength to care
for yourself and thereby learning to care for another.” —Stephanie Danler New York Times
bestselling author of Sweetbitter An intimately honest memoir about motherhood 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
unflinching take on motherhood and its expectations in which the beatific narrative women have
been fed—one of immediate connection to your child followed by a joyful path of maternal
discovery—turns out to be not quite true. In The Motherload Hoover provides a candid funny
and sobering look at the journey women undertake as expectant mothers and wives from the early
days of pregnancy through labor and beyond. Like most of us Sarah Hoover grew up imagining a
certain life for herself—career love marriage children—and when Hoover moved from Indiana to
New York City to study art history the life she’d imagined began falling into place. She got
her degree landed a job in a gallery made friends and went on some exceptionally bad dates.
She also met interesting artists one of whom became her future husband (a whirlwind romance
theirs exciting even with its imperfections). But when Hoover got pregnant the life she
imagined began to unravel. She felt like an imposter in her own body. She grew distant from
her friends and husband. She suffered from anxiety fear guilt and shame. She also
experienced trauma at the hands of one of her doctors—a stark trigger. And eventually when her
son was born there was no… joy . Instead she felt “disoriented lonely and like none of my
clothes fit.” Why was she seeing and hearing things that weren’t there? Why was she so angry
and miserable when she had everything she thought she wanted? Why was the life she’d built
falling apart? It took her months to discover that she was suffering from severe postpartum
depression. And it took even longer to trace all the threads that came to inform her
experience. At its core The Motherload is about learning to forgive yourself for not being
what you’ve been told you must be and for not loving the way you’ve been told you should. It’s
about the uniquely female experience of constantly grappling with expectation versus reality
no matter your circumstance and a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect
being. It is a moving exciting roller coaster ride and a propulsive addition to the canon of
women’s literature.
