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.

A fantastic memoir about motherhood! It's a subject that's been written about a lot but this is a fresh take an unlike any books on the topic I've ever read. Completely flew through this one.

The Motherload is a collection of stories about motherhood, specifically postpartum depression. It's been compared to Anna Marie Tendler's Men Have Called Her Crazy, and there are definitely similarities.

However, The Motherload sometimes feels a bit too privileged for my taste. It can be hard to relate to the narrator when their experiences seem so far removed from everyday life. The narrator is unlikeable and distant. Her sarcastic tone might work for some people but it really turned me off of this book.

That said, the writing is good, and some people will definitely connect with it.

I'd recommend it if:
1) You loved "Men Have Called Her Crazy"
2) You're curious about the lives of wealthy mothers

**I received an ARC of The Motherload in exchange for a fair and honest review.**

Hoover has written a candid memoir about her experience-which might not mesh with the experiences of others-of becoming a mother. She is admittedly privileged but that doesn't mean that she didn't suffer from post partum depression and from self doubt even before her son Guy was born. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. You might not relate to the details of her life but I suspect many will recognize elements of what was going through her chaotic mind.

Thank you to the publisher for an ARC.

There were times I thought this book was fiction - it read that way. It was absurd, chaotic, and concerning. But that’s what makes this memoir great. The rawness left me wanting to turn every page and keep going to figure out when she’d snap back to humanity. I really enjoyed the flow of the story and all its redemption. At times it dragged on, but overall, I’d recommend it to friends.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon Element for the gifted e-arc, and to Simon Element for the physical ARC of The Motherload by Sarah Hoover. This book was a journey, and I almost immediately DNF out of sheer loathing of the author and her privilege and attitude (not to mention her husband's). I stuck with it for a few pages more, and began to see the nuance beneath the privilege (some of it might be the author's attempts to be humorous but she lacks any humility besides using her Midwest upbringing as a reason to assume she understands life outside of the art world.)

That said, I was stunned by how real her portrayal of postpartum depression, anxiety, disassociation and psychosis are and how unmoored new mothers feel without "support". Again, it's hard to understate how privileged she was with a night nurse and the ability to sleep through the night without tending to baby, and even her ability to get out of the apartment without the baby in those early days. I actually gave birth the same day or possibly the day before the author, in the same year, so I felt her experiences as my own experiences. Her descriptions took me back to the recovery phase, the shocking loss of freedom, the imbalance I felt in reconciling who I was and who I had become, the fears of harm coming to my baby, the rage, etc. I didn't have much support outside of my husband and hadn't ever been to therapy. I see so much of myself in Sarah Hoover's descriptions (minus her weird baby shower at the Chateau Marmont).

I think if readers can get through some of the disconnect, this might really help a new mom who thinks she is alone in feeling this way, and while I wasn't as off-kilter in my own connection with my baby, I think that will strike a chord as well. I watched a few of the author's interviews and she points out that things can change after only a few months, and she did start to seem more relatable and funny when I watched her rather than read her words.

I would tentatively be interested in hearing more from Sarah Hoover, with a bit less naval-gazing. I honestly wanted to know more about how her sister and friends handled their birth experiences. I don't want to read any more about her husband. He was the least likeable person in the book, and there aren't many likeable people. Except for Sharon, the night nurse.

When I was reading the book, I did have to pause and look up who the author was. I was not surprised to see she was a rich white woman because that's who the book sounded like the whole time through. It always sounded sort of flat and soulless? I was sort of excited when the opening chapter is her admitting (in different words) that she doesn't feel like she's bonding with her child, but the actual soul of the book never seemed to actually come together or feel like it was something that was for me.

It's not poorly written. And I think it could be for some people. But this just isn't the book for me.

Thanks to Netgalley for the free ARC.

Not for the faint of heart.
I found the authors stories impactful if not quite relatable.
This book won’t be for everyone and could run some folks the wrong way or be more stressful than helpful, but for others the frankness will be helpful and even liberating.

I admire the story this book is trying to tell but I just felt pretty early on that it wasn't for me! And that's okay! The writing style reminded me, a bit, of my favorite types of pieces from Vulture or The Cut - but I prefer those small bites and not a whole book at once; while this is something I can't see myself investing tons of time into pouring over at this point I do hope to come back to it once I have a child