The Motherload

Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood

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Pub Date Jan 14 2025 | Archive Date Jan 24 2025
Simon Element | S&S/Simon Element

Description

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.
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...

Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781668010136
PRICE $29.99 (USD)
PAGES 320

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Average rating from 12 members


Featured Reviews

This is the book I believe many women are searching for to validate their feelings as mothers. Especially becoming a mother and all that happens to your body, heart, mind, and soul. Hoover writes in a raw and authentic voice. Heartbreaking but hopeful too. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

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I admire the hell out of memoirists who are willing to probe the parts of themselves that don’t align with our societies’ long-held value systems. Sarah writes not just about motherhood, but also childhood, her career, her marriage, and being a woman in unsparing, honest language. It always feels so cathartic to read about women who have unconventional feelings about parts of life that we are expected to be uncompromisingly devoted to. Sarah’s writing was a pleasure to read, and I found myself frequently highlighting her words. Sarah’s is a privileged life, but she writes about her mental health, her insecurities, her failings, etc. in such raw language, I felt extremely connected to her and her writing.

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