Sarah Hoover’s Fierce Rewrite of the Motherhood Myth
Sarah Hoover’s first book, The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood, is a sharp-edged response to the sentimentalized myths of motherhood that society insists on perpetuating. It’s not a manifesto against parenting, nor is it a guidebook. It’s a ferocious act of honesty about the reality of being a mother in a world that simultaneously idealizes and diminishes the maternal experience. From receiving an unauthorized “extra stitch for him” to bleeding postpartum on Gagosian Gallery’s immaculate white sofa, this is Hoover’s no-holds-barred, 338-page welcome to motherhood.
“I want someone to read this and know how terrified I was, and how scary and sad and abusive birth felt,” Hoover tells Observer. Awakened to the drought of honesty about motherhood in public discourse, as she puts it, writing the book felt inevitable, if not urgent. “I hope it will help prepare people, not because their experience will match mine—but more in the sense it is made clear that you have a right to safety for your body, and you have to get very explicit about what that means for you in this world.”
Early in The Motherload, a pregnant Hoover finds herself at a wedding, seated next to a woman who had recently given birth to twins. Between the clinking of glasses and the distant murmur of speeches, the woman delivered a stark and unsolicited warning: “Labor is just fucking brutal. Things do not get better from here.” The words unsettled Hoover, still only a bystander to motherhood, planting a seed of dread she tried to bury.
“My reaction was to bury my head further in the sand, ostrich-style,” she matter-of-factly explains. “I thought, ‘I’m going to pretend this isn’t happening until it happens.’” Hoover dodged birthing classes, refused to Google anything about labor and placed her hopes in the care of a private doctor because she thought that’s what you’re supposed to do, and felt lucky she could pay for it. “Maybe it will guarantee she’ll be nicer to me,” she rationalized. “Maybe, fingers crossed, she’ll do right by me, take care of me and make it so that this isn’t horrible. Not true.”
This avoidance came crashing down when the reality of childbirth hit—a moment Hoover describes in visceral detail in The Motherload. In the hands of an OB-GYN and a healthcare system she’d trusted not to hurt her, one traumatic experience after the next left her physically and emotionally wrecked. The mythology of maternal instinct shattered, exposing the raw and often unacknowledged truth about how little support new mothers receive. Postpartum depression and anxiety quickly followed.
“I thought that when the baby came out, my love for him would be so transformative that all my maternal instincts would kick in, and I’d anticipate his needs and feel joy in caring for him,” she recounts. “And then it didn’t happen. None of the rest follows if you don’t immediately love your kid or feel connected.” The reality of caring for a newborn is anything but intuitive, and when your maternal love doesn’t arrive instantly—or in the way one might expect—it’s profoundly isolating. “If even one person had said to me, ‘Look, you may not love your baby when it comes out, and that’s okay. You will eventually. It’s going to be okay.’ It would have been different. I had never heard that from one single person in my life.”
If last week’s New York Times profile, which reduces the author, art historian and cultural commentator to “wife of the artist Tom Sachs,” was the first time you’d heard Sarah Hoover’s name, you’d be forgiven for writing her off as just another influencer looking to grow her platform. To be clear, the article, optimized for SEO with the title “Sarah Hoover Dishes on Her Life With Tom Sachs,” is not a book review, despite its timing (published five days before The Motherload release date of January 14). Hoover knows the piece was always supposed to be a feature; she understands that authors must sit for such promos. She’s smart enough to expect some backlash. “Everyone knows never to read the Amazon and Goodreads ratings,” Hoover nervously laughed to fellow author Jenny Mollen in a far more helpful and informative interview last December.
Still, Hoover may not have anticipated that any publisher would so excitedly toss such obvious bait—like the fact that Hoover’s baby wore a cashmere cardigan on the day the Times visited her Nolita apartment (who wouldn’t put their kid in something special for a feature like that?)—to predictably angry readers, who roasted her in the comments section for what, in their view, is complaining. There’s understandably little appetite in 2025 for a white, wealthy, educated person documenting their hardships. But isn’t that kind of the point? In the U.S. healthcare system, what happened to Hoover can happen to anyone. How many such stories aren’t being heard? Shouldn’t those with privilege use it to inform and advocate for the less seen? Hoover has a track record of doing just that. She actively supports public art projects across the country. She co-founded American Ballet Theatre’s Accelerator Committee and regularly partners with nonprofit organizations to address food insecurity and homelessness.
That the New York Times chose to tell her story according to how it played out amongst those in Tom Sachs’ orbit? That didn’t surprise her, Hoover says.
“Happily, I have my own life,” she quips, though her ensuing uneasiness can’t mask that she’d wished for something deeper. “I tried hard to acknowledge my privilege,” she explains. “Postpartum depression impacts lives across the socioeconomic spectrum. I believe in trying to create the world we wish to live in. Which for me means trying to alleviate women’s shame and judgment.”
It’s impossible to detach the gendered dynamics of parenting from motherhood, and The Motherload doesn’t shy away from addressing the failures of men, particularly when it comes to stepping up as equal partners. In a transformative juncture midway through the book, her therapist’s candor about her husband’s shortcomings permits Hoover to be honest about her frustrations with the blissfully aloof Sachs for the first time. Of this conversation with her therapist, Hoover writes: I was taken aback by her openness. No one, no doctor, no professional, no friend, even, had articulated this same frustration so eloquently.
Throughout The Motherload, Sachs puts his art above all else, arriving late and leaving early each time he’s needed. He flitters off merrily to his studio, assuming Hoover and their newborn are set in the hands of hired help. At home, Sachs dribbles soy sauce on the counters and drops trails of crumbs on the floors as Hoover furiously and invisibly cleans up after him. Every so often, Sachs breaks from flirting with the gaggle of ex-girlfriends and adoring apprentices that surround him to exhibit acts of kindness toward his wife that are almost immediately spoiled by transactional requests for sex. When Sachs finally acknowledges Hoover’s pain and discomfort, it’s half-baked—more an observation and validation of her depression and anxiety than an admittance of any role he played contributing to her predicament.
In one of many candid reflections, Hoover writes: When I looked at my baby, I felt dead inside. But when I looked at my husband, I felt too alive, burning with rage, even when he was being kind and thoughtful, even when he was trying his hardest for me…Everything hurt to the point of distraction.
The shortcomings of male partners is a subject Hoover believes to be under-discussed among women and part of a more significant systemic issue: women are conditioned to find fault in themselves rather than hold men accountable. Complaining about your husband can feel like admitting you’re not a priority for him, she says. “It’s embarrassing, and it shouldn’t be.”
The pressure I’d always felt—made up in my head or absorbed from the pop culture or both—that I simply had to be nonchalant about my own emotional needs in order to be desirable. There was no way I was going to be able to suddenly demand a new version of our marriage that felt adequate to my growing realization of my needs. Womanhood, in my estimation, was made up of death by a thousand cuts. It was trying to have a career yet feeling huge pressure to make dinner for your kids every single night; it was feeling sick and depressed to death while perpetuating the human species and having your very doctor tell you to be grateful for feeling that way.
Worse, even, is how easily frankness about the difficulties of mothering is dismissed as negativity or even hostility. “We are taught one million different ways from the time we are born that complaining isn’t part of being a ‘good girl,’” Hoover continues. For women, and particularly for mothers, voicing dissatisfaction or pain threatens the very foundations of our patriarchal order. This cultural expectation of silence leaves many women to navigate motherhood’s challenges alone, unsure if their struggles are typical or something shameful.
This leads Hoover to another frustration: literature, art and film have historically ignored or marginalized the maternal experience, often reducing it to a symbol rather than exploring it as a lived reality.
“There’s almost no art about motherhood by women,” she points out. “It’s not appealing to the market.” Hoover spent decades as a gallery director with Gagosian, and her artistic sensibility is evident throughout. The Motherload references centuries of paintings and literature. Hoover cites Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 icon Valley of the Dolls and Penelope Mortimer’s 1958 novel Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting: (What happened to her during the six hours of labour nobody ever knew. Something snapped in her, or something fell into place, or her brain, under pressure, tossed about like the coloured pieces in a kaleidoscope, setting it in an entirely different pattern). Save for Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s exceptional work of fiction, Fleishman Is In Trouble, Hoover laments the lack of modern works addressing the realities of motherhood. There just aren’t many books that depict motherhood in a way that feels honest, she says, “probably because the women who have experienced motherhood are fucking busy doing other things like being a mom and trying to make money and support their families and don’t have time to write a book. It’s part of why I wrote mine.”
Hoover’s prose is vivid, with comparisons (clouds like bruises) that make you stop and reread a sentence just to savor it. Her ability to capture both the beauty and brutality of motherhood is what sets her book apart. Becoming a mother forces numerous reckonings, like coming to terms with one’s upbringing, and Hoover offers readers a rare glimpse into experiences often sanitized or romanticized.
What I wanted to shout after my mother as I watched her leave me — that I was sorry for all the worst parts of myself, for all the times I was horrible, that I’d be sorry for every second for the rest of my life; that I forgave her for her faults, because I underwood them; that I empathized—didn’t come out in time, but I felt that maybe, somehow, she knew already.
At its core, The Motherload is more than a memoir; it’s a cultural intervention, a rallying cry for women to demand better—from themselves, their partners and the institutions that continue to fail them. Hoover’s unflinching honesty invites readers to reexamine their assumptions about motherhood and challenge societal norms that perpetuate silence and shame. Her message is clear: the myth of the perfect mother serves no one. By sharing her story, Hoover hopes to empower women to advocate for themselves, prepare for the unexpected, and, most importantly, extend grace to themselves when things don’t go as planned.
“This isn’t just a book for mothers,” she asserts. It’s for anyone who wants to understand what it takes to bring life into the world—and what it costs. Everyone needs to be part of the conversation to change the motherhood narrative. Hoover highlights the profound (and increasingly well-documented) connection between traumatic births and postpartum depression—and that her second pregnancy, six years after her first, was a vastly different experience, marked by healing rather than pain.
“I was determined not to have the same experience,” she says. “I knew that it was possible.” Armed with knowledge, therapy and a support system, Hoover avoided the debilitating postpartum depression that marked her entry into motherhood. She credits much of this to being proactive—staying on antidepressants during her pregnancy and assembling a team of advocates for her birth. Her advice for expectant mothers is pragmatic.
“The world isn’t going to do women any favors, so you must protect yourself,” Hoover implores. “That’s part of being a grown-up. And I was not a grown-up before I had my first baby.” It’s a sobering but empowering message that underscores the book’s broader thesis: the only way to survive motherhood is to take ownership of your experience.