I think this book explores a really important topic, which is complex feelings around motherhood and PPD, but ultimately, I am not the right audience for this book as someone who is single and childless. Additionally, I felt the writing style (independent of topic) didn't really work for me. It felt scattered and a bit hard to follow.

After reading The Motherload, I have a mix of emotions. Anger is one, confusion another, and sadness is in there as well. Hoover tells the story of her first year as a mother, as well as the history of her life before, with focus on the relationship with her husband and family.

The confusion comes from how she could have let herself fall in love with such a doubtable man. All the signs were there before she had joined her life with this man, but because of her own low self-value, she fooled herself into thinking she should hold onto what she had. And as someone who has felt that I understand fully her mindset, but I wish she had been saved before all of this had occurred.

The anger is a result of how her support system failed her in so many ways before and after the birth. Her parents are clearly just titles, and her mother in particular makes me so angry. Her father, while less infuriating than his wife, is still an example of man doing the bare minimum. Hoover's husband is a whole other basket of eggs and will solidify a lot of female reader's decisions to remain single and child free. He is the most shallow, unaware individual, all the while pursuing other women constantly throughout his relationship with Hoover, even when she is struggling at her worst with PPD and psychosis. Even her friends fail her, while in less despicable ways. But sadly, when Hoover needed help, most of the people in her life were dismissive.

Sadness is in play for all that she had to go through. Mental health is not taken as seriously as it should be in this country, and while Hoover can be obnoxious on her own terms, no one should have to suffer like she did.

I think everyone should read her story, if only to bring light to how women suffer when it comes to mental health, and certainly how ignored it can be after becoming a mother. We haven't made nearly as many leaps and bounds as we would like to think when it comes to women's mental health and post-partum care. And maybe her story will help bring awareness to it.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Simon Element for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

I'm not sure this was 100% for me. Either way i was intrigued. It fell flat for me unfortunately. The pacing was what i had the biggest issue with.

I didn't expect to LOVE this book or relate to the author's experience so much, but that's what good writing does! I thoroughly enjoyed this account and have recommended it to numerous friends, mothers and not.

Even as this is a memoir and it's written from the point of view of and about a real person, I am going to try to review without making any direct judgments on the author, herself as it feels cruel. In terms of the structure of the book, I really did not enjoy the first chapter and actually did put the book down and almost thought of not picking it back up. The first chapter is strangely talks about her Baby Shower but apparently it took place AFTER her baby was born and she was living alone in a hotel in LA with her child and nanny whilst her husband and home were in NYC. How did she, an Indianapolis native living in NYC, have enough friends to invite to a baby shower after her baby was born whilst her husband wasn't around and basically the shower involved people smoking cigarettes, drinking copious amounts of alcohol and basically throwing a party that had nothing to do with a baby. Then when her husband does come to the hotel after he is done with his art work, he turns, the baby falls and she loses her mind on him. That's the first chapter in its entirety and it was bizarre and completely unrelatable. I think there are a lot of points in this book that she paints as seeming "crazy" and "shocking" like paying for night nurses and having round the clock care and outsourcing every part of motherhood and chores, which she phrases as if might be shocking to the reader but as most of her readers are going to be working women in the coastal cities, I don't think anyone is going to be that shocked about it. Having round the clock and exceedingly expensive help is no longer the bourgeois flex that she thinks it is. I also felt that although the main message of the book somehow wasn't about how motherhood completely changed her life but rather that being a mother just didn't allow her to do all the things that come with youth and a lack of responsibilities that a lot of people experience in their twenties. I get it, most mothers mourn their lack of freedom and carefreeness being able to just go out and get about their lives without remembering what is needed by another human being completely dependent on you but also - the things that she misses are mostly going out partying at night and getting drunk and talking about art? I wonder if she realises that even if she had not had a kid in her early 30s most people around her would have or they would have stopped partying for various reasons and she would still be mourning that life and identity anyway even if she didn't become a mother? It was also a bit surprising as this book was published 7 years after she gave birth but it reads a little like journal entries that must have been written in the early years of becoming a mother so they come across as immature and seem incongruous with her current life. In any case, I appreciated having access and a glance into the life of what motherhood is like and what thoughts and conversations occur between a specific group of NYC party girls turned mothers as I have often wondered what lies beneath the Instagram perfect image they present. Well now I know and it's illuminating because at the end of the day, as she acknowledges a lot of her problems are so privileged compared to others out there but it is human nature to still despair and complains in life. I mean, I can't really blame her that she lives a sheltered life and the only things she can find to complain about are so small because it a weird way it's not her fault that her life is comfortable. Didn't relate at all and felt like a vanity project.

dnf at 19% because I have never seen someone so out of touch like truly crying with a silver spoon and wiping them off with a satin handkerchief. I liked some of the quotes about her insecurity but the majority of it just felt like the most lavish pity party

i really admired the honesty of this book, but i wanted more self awareness. the author and her husband are both public figures who have received a lot of backlash for the way they treat others, and i thought this book's exploration of post-partum depression contained a shocking lack of acknowledgment of the women who deal with this issue without live-in nannies or other privileges.

that said, the writer is talented and entertaining. i would read more from her.

This book left a bad taste in my mouth. Sarah Hoover complains A LOT about being a mother. I'm sure being a mother is hard work, but it's the WAY she complains about it that irked me. She sounded so stuck-up and self-righteous. I ended not liking her in the end. She was so entitled and annoying. I don't know how this woman has a husband and friends.

This is a memoir by a woman who suffered from severe postpartum distress and PTSD brought on by her pre-natal (mis) treatment and then the traumatic birth of her son. However, she only figures this out after much shame and trying to hide her feelings, when she needs therapy and intervention nearing a breakdown.

Sarah Hoover is a wealthy, art world socialite, along with her successful art world husband. They seem to live a charmed life of socializing with the New York and LA upper crust. But when Sarah becomes pregnant she doubts whether she can mother. When the child is born she does not bond with him. She feels terrible yet hires a full-time nanny to raise the boy for the few years she suffers from the aftermath of her pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum symptoms. Problems develop within the marriage, she contemplates divorce. And during that time is when she bonds with her child, when she imagines it would be she and him alone, without the father in the home.

I've read reviews of this book shaming Sarah for her privilege, somehow feeling she has no right to the pain she felt that had nothing to do with ones' bank account. Any and many women experience this, regardless of social status. It is offputting to read reviews that bash her for that, for ability to hire help when she clearly is not in any shape to do it alone.

I hope more women will see through the frivilous attention to appearance, travelings, lunches and allow themselves to identify or at least have compassion for the author's experiences. I'm glad she wrote her book.

Thanks to NetGalley for the eARC.

The Motherload by Sarah Hoover is a heartfelt and thought-provoking exploration of the complexities of motherhood, identity, and personal growth. Hoover blends humor and vulnerability to present a candid look at the emotional and physical weight mothers carry. The story is emotionally raw and messy, and many mothers will be able to relate to this read.

I really enjoyed this memoir. It is written with a great deal of introspection and honesty. Sarah Hoover’s experience with motherhood and postpartum depression is messy and harsh and refreshingly honest. The vignettes within this book are well-organized and really allow the reader to understand and empathize with Hoover. There are moments where this book becomes overly reflective, and the narrative takes on an intellectual tone, which I found distracting. Overall, however, I genuinely enjoyed this memoir.

This book is really hard to rate. While I sincerely appreciated Hoover's unfiltered look into pregnancy, birth, and motherhood - I found her somewhat insufferable. She comes off as pretentious, spoiled, and very out of touch at moments. But on the next page she will be voicing such important information about motherhood and post-partum depression.

WOOF. This memoir was both hard to get through and hard to put down. Sarah Hoover paints such a brutally honest and raw depiction of her year-long struggle with Postpartum Depression and Psychosis, and it was a really compelling and heartstring-tugging read.

I rarely assign a star rating to the memoirs that I read - I hate sorting someone else’s most vulnerable moments into such a subjective rating. Instead, I’ll break this down into what I loved and what I didn’t:

LOVED
* Sarah’s honestly around not being the average mother - she is wealthy and has privileges afforded to her that most do not (ex. A live-in nanny, lavish tropical vacations, extended stays at the Chateau Marmont bungalow in LA).
* Her vulnerability around EXACTLY what she was feeling (this could be a trigger for people who’ve experienced PPMDs, read with caution) from wanting her husband to die to just how numb she felt about her son for the first year.
* Her ability to suck you into her narrative. Throughout this read, I really felt like I was there with her in bed, spiraling about the various facets of motherhood and marriage. Her writing is extremely compelling and even though the material was heavy, I was hardly able to put it down.
* The focus on the relationship with her mother and how it has shaped her view on femininity and motherhood. This hit me so hard and I highlighted a lot of passages about her relationship with her mom.
* Her dive into how her birth trauma and her past sexual trauma were connected and her healing through that realization.
* The art history! I had so much fun looking up the art she was referencing - it made the things she was experiencing feel so much more real.
* Her honesty in seeing her faults and wrongdoings, even when in the midst of psychosis.

DIDN’T LOVE
* Her husband. Full stop. The reveal about their marriage working out after the plane confrontation was shocking, as was finding out they’re still together and have a second child. Not to mention the allegations against him.
* Her friends. I wanted to throw my Kindle across the room when they basically talked her into taking her husband back. I cannot imagine a single friend of mine doing or saying what they did if I was in her situation.
* The way that the Medical Industrial Complex failed Sarah. This was perhaps the hardest aspect of the book to read, and with good reason! She was repeatedly gaslit and traumatized by her medical providers. It hurt even more to read this as a doula, knowing how different her pregnancy, birth, and postpartum could’ve been if she had a doula there to educate and support her. I was really glad to see her rally so hard for better reproductive care.

If you are interested in memoirs about difficult postpartum experiences, I would recommend this book to you, but with caution. Take care of yourself while reading.

It must take courage to share a personal story like this. The Motherload is Sarah Hoover’s memoir about having postpartum depression, but it is also about more than that. It’s also about her upbringing, self-confidence (or lack thereof), her relationship with her own mother, her past sexual and relationship trauma, and her marriage. Sarah and her husband, Tom, are really interesting people, or at least she presents them that way. I adore how she portrays their connection in the early days. It was heartbreaking to see how Sarah’s depression went unrecognized and ignored, and yet was really taking a toll on her life and her marriage.

I enjoyed Hoover’s memoir and am thankful that she was willing to share her story. The first chapter was kind of flighty and throws the reader into a chaotic situation where I wasn’t totally sure what was going on. But please keep reading because it is much more organized after that. Hoover’s story is genuine, and she certainly had a lot on her plate. I did not always agree with some the lifestyle choices, but am grateful that she got help and is telling her experience which may help others. Thank you to NetGalley and S&S/Simon Element for the digital ARC.

If you're interested in this book for the exploration and examination of one woman's post-partum depression, just know that examination (if it comes) will come from a ridiculously privileged woman who cannot write in a way to connect with the average person. I DNFed this book ridiculously early because the privilege was just so exhausting that I couldn't ignore it. This woman admits she was raised in an upper class family, and she ends up marrying a very successful artist. The little bit I read about her experience with motherhood showed that she had the privilege of being able to put her motherhood aside through a live-in nanny in exchange for drug use. I was interested in this book because I have a true fear of becoming a mother and learning I do not like it, and I know that Hoover would not be able to give me any insight into what my own possible experience would be like if that were the case. I am glad I realized this early on so I could put this aside and not waste my time.

The writing is fine, the substance is just exhausting to read.

The Motherload is Hoover’s account of the severe postpartum depression she experienced after the birth of her first child, and how it affected her sense of self as well as her marriage.

Unlike Anna Marie Tendler’s Men Have Called Her Crazy, Hoover’s memoir is raw and unflinchingly honest. It also advances the reader’s knowledge of postpartum depression by showing how prior sexual trauma, and trauma unnecessarily inflicted by health care providers during the birth process can make the experience much worse.

However, the book will likely engender strong mixed responses as Hoover’s experiences are colored by social class. The financial resources to which Hoover has access — including a full-time nanny, therapy, and time away from work — are luxuries very few women can afford. While acknowledging her privilege, Hoover does not address what ordinary women should do if they find themselves suffering the same debilitating condition.

That being said, I still found the book to be a worthwhile read, as it is a well-written and compelling account of the ravaging effects of postpartum depression on the many women who have suffered in silence.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster and NetGalley for providing me with a complimentary advanced copy of this book.

This book was brought to my attention as it was compared with similar elemental styles within Anna Marie Tendler’s memoir “Men Have Called Her Crazy.” I loved Anna Marie Tendler’s memoir. This one, not so much.

I do want to highlight some similarities between myself and Sarah Hoover. We are both mother’s. Our firstborns are both sons. We both immediately felt the quaking effects of debilitating and crippling postpartum depression. We unfortunately both suffered birth trauma and early pregnancy losses.
That’s a lot to unravel and issues that many women go through and have since the beginning of time.

However, that’s where the similarities end. I truly wish I could have gained something/anything from this memoir.
There is little to no relatability beyond what I have stated above. I feel the reader needs to be in a specific tax bracket and live a specific lifestyle to really gain an appreciation for this book.
Sarah has a full time, live in nanny for her infant son. Hey, that is great! You go girl! It takes a village. Heal your demons. If you live in the Hamptons, NYC, or LA you might relate to this. Most of us reading this do not. So grateful to the nanny and I would have enjoyed reading the book from her perspective. She was witty.
As the PPD fog lifts, she flits about NYC doing whatever she wants as if she is not a mother while simultaneously plotting her husband’s downfall.

Moving on, when Sarah is globe trotting and actually has to be a full time present mother because the nanny didn’t tag along, she mentions not knowing how to properly change and clean her uncircumcised son’s soiled diaper. At the time of this specific detail, the baby was one. Not a newborn, ONE. What mother doesn’t know how to safely clean and change her child’s diaper? I could not get over this detail.

Sarah’s relationship is also riddled with infidelity on her husband’s end. He’s a walking red flag. Grossly unsupportive when she was in the depths of PPD and hardly a father figure to their son, many readers probably fist pumped the air when they thought she would be leaving the marriage. Prepare for more disappointment. As of January 2025, she has gone on to have another child with this man.

I anticipate many eye opening and scathing reviews in the future. I had such high hopes for this book. Well, I did love the cover!
This may not have been the book I was hoping for, but maybe it will be for you.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for allowing me to read The Motherload, publishing January 14, 2025.

I was impressed by this memoir, though it wasn't always comfortable to sit with. Despite enjoying it overall, I do think it'll end up being a polarizing "motherhood memoir".

Sarah Hoover is an artist married to another, well-established artist (Tom Sachs, for anyone as nosy as I am.) They live a pretty privileged life, full of art, parties and traveling, with a big, romantic love story.

After a fraught pregnancy and a traumatic birth experience, Sarah enters an extremely difficult year, where she suffers from a harrowing period of post-partum. She spares no expense when it comes to details, the result being a book like a raw wound. And I appreciated that!

With every resource available to them, Sarah still resisted asking for help--and even once she did, held back details so it wouldn't seem as bad as it really was. She was lonely, self-isolated, and angry. Things were really bad for Sarah, for so much longer than they needed to be. Many mothers, and women, will be able to relate to the experience of feeling overlooked, not taken seriously, and overwhelmed. We put so much on women, but offer no help in return. It's a tale as old as time.

With memoirs, I don't like to go in and "critique" how someone chooses to tell their stories. So, this is a less a critique, and more of a personal preference: I'm glad this exists, though due to how heavy the majority of the book was, I struggled to continue through it, once I hit around 60%. I really carried the author's experience and emotions, and that doesn't make for "light reading". Many of the heavier chapters bled into one another, which both felt intentional, and also a tad overwhelming. I wish it had been just a pinch shorter.

Ultimately, I think anyone could pick this up and take something away from it. The author's experience may not be exactly universal (at one point she talks about bleeding into a diaper next to a pool Marilyn Monroe laid out by, and I rolled my eyes a little) but the takeaway is: people who give birth deserve more, and I'm glad the conversation is growing more open surrounding that.

(Thank you to the publisher for an early copy, in exchange for a review)

I absolutely love the cover of this book, but unfortunately hated what lie inside. The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood is a memoir that I found hard to read and even harder to relate to. This is not a book I would recommend (to anyone?) as it felt so very self-serving. Perhaps ‘An Antithesis to Motherhood’ would have been a more apt title.

Sara Hoover’s memoir centers in the art world of New York City. Self-obsessed and drug abusing, Hoover wants to encourage an unconventional portrait of motherhood. No one’s perfect, right? She details meeting her successful artist husband and her idolization of his status in the art world. She portrays herself as very insecure and having no real goals in life outside of hedonistic pleasures. Once her son is born, Hoover becomes unmoored as I suspect she never really envisioned life with the realities of having a child.

As a mother that has worked really hard to identify my values and live according to those values, I found this book hard to stomach. I didn’t find it endearing or relatable, but more so sad and disheartening. I was pretty appalled to look Hoover up after reading this to see that she has a second child – after outsourcing most parent-related duties of her first child and having a pretty uninvolved husband. Although I like to remember that everyone is different and we need different people to make the world go round, this kind of lifestyle and subsequent “acceptance” and praise of not prioritizing your child feels like a disservice to women and mothers alike. There is a level of privilege spoken of that is unprecedented to most mothers. I believe this book will likely be highly polarizing in its reviews.

Thank you to NetGalley, Simon Element, S&S/Simon Element, and the author Sarah Hoover for an ARC of The Motherload in exchange for an honest review.

Motherload opens with Hoover planning a baby shower at the Chateau Mormont (natch) and complaining that she felt “nothing for this baby who’d come out of my body. I didn’t want to change diapers and pretend I thought that baby stuff was cute. I had no interest in sitting in Mommy-and-Me music classes or play groups.” Hoover then goes back in time to her initial encounter with the “New York famous” artist whom she met when she answered the phone at a gallery where she worked as a salesperson and artist liaison. The “mythological” artist, Tom Sachs, finds Hoover “sassy,” and she recites with raw honesty and self-deprecating humor, the friend frenzy over their early dates, the excitement and instability of a new relationship, and a marriage six years later when she was twenty-eight and “rife with insecurity, having no detailed vision for my future, no calling to fulfill or idea of who I really was.”

Hoover’s memoir is a retread of the numerous books and films that examine how motherhood changes a woman physically and emotionally. But, Hoover does not experience the sleepless nights, the repetitive routines, or the exhaustion that bedevils most new mothers. Instead, Hoover is able to hire a full-time nanny and only needs to allot a “mandated” thirty minutes of playtime with the infant she found “physically heinous” a few times a day. She enjoys fresh highlights, manicures and pedicures, workouts, acupuncture, massages, facials and a luxury trip to Bali. She hires a second life coach, a hypnotherapist, and someone to organize her closets. While her husband lacks accountability, and relies upon dim platitudes, Hoover had the financial resources to outsource the repetitive tasks that sap the sanity of most new mothers.

I think that this memoir will be polarizing for many who read it, but it might be helpful for those new mothers who feel shame for not immediately falling in love with their infant and for feeling rage and despair. Thank you S&S/Simon Element and Net Galley for an advanced copy of this honest and often funny memoir.