text by Mieke Marple
I was not expecting to fall for Sarah Hoover when I requested an advance copy of her upcoming memoir The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood (352 pages; Simon Element). Having recently become a mother myself, I was secretly hoping for the opposite—to sneer with self-righteous contempt at her privileged complaints about the experience. After all, almost two years ago, Hoover and her husband the artist Tom Sachs (who features prominently in Hoover’s memoir), were dubbed “the bad art couple” by ArtNet news after posting an ad for an assistant that read like flagrant exploitation.
With this ignoble agenda in mind, I nearly stopped reading after the memoir’s first chapter. In it, Hoover drinks and does drugs in an ass-short skirt while her Trinidadian nanny cares for her 10-month-old son at her post-baby shower at the Chateau Marmont. Between Chateau scene details, Hoover notes “the simple, unspeakable reality that from the moment my son was born, this baby sometimes meant as much to me as a stone-cold marble statue.” Brazen as Hoover is, she fears vocalizing this apathy to anyone lest they consider her lack of feeling a “Manson family-level crime.” Well, at least she knows she’s a monster, I thought before catching myself. If even a feminist, 12-stepping woman like me is judging another mother for not being self-sacrificing enough, what chance do mamas the world over have in escaping the bonds of motherhood’s suffocating expectations? I kept reading.
In good books, the protagonist changes. In great books, the reader changes. By the end of The Motherload, I felt completely different about Hoover than I did after those first few pages. Throughout her memoir, Hoover is unapologetically herself. She doesn’t pretend to not use excessive manicures as a coping mechanism for her then-undiagnosed postpartum depression, or to not fly around the world with a live-in nanny in tow. But neither does she pretend to be someone with the kind of confidence to not put her successful artist husband on a pedestal, even when he hurts her with his flirtations, emotional infidelities, and absences. And, really, who can blame her?—given the centuries of lionizing white male artists as godly conduits. Thus, I found myself literally fist-pumping later in the book when Hoover stands up for herself to Sachs. Such is the power of her raw honesty and authenticity.
The Motherload is so much more than a memoir about postpartum depression: it is a hammer to the silences that exist around childbirth and early motherhood. Nothing is too taboo for Hoover’s sardonic candor. Whether she is discussing the way her body looks post-labor (i.e. still pregnant), bleeding through her adult diaper when she goes back to work a month after giving birth, or the repulsion she feels looking at her baby’s features. The only subjects Hoover fails to probe deeply are the roles money and race play in motherhood. Her interactions with her nanny, for instance, are some of the most riveting scenes in the book, yet this largely unexamined relationship gets pushed to the background.
Of all the topics Hoover tackles, it is the frank depiction of her unraveling marriage—which all the nannies, manicures, blowouts, and drugs in the world can’t seem to save—that most affected me. In many ways, The Motherload is as much a portrait of a marriage as it is an honest window into one woman’s experience with early motherhood. I was fascinated by the ways Hoover’s and Sach’s marriage aligned with their “bad art couple” reputation, as much as I was humbled by the complex humanity each person exudes over the course of the memoir—a reminder of how little anyone can know about anyone else, from Instagram, gossip pages, or elsewhere.
It’s worth noting that according to a study by renowned researchers and clinical psychologists Drs. John and Julie Gottman, two thirds of couples report a decline in relationship satisfaction up to three years after having a baby. That is all couples, not just ones with mothers suffering from postpartum depression, which one in eight women experience. Noel Biderman, creator of the now defunct website Ashley Madison (think OkayCupid for cheaters), said that most men—based on user data from over 27 million clients—cheat during or immediately after their wives’ first pregnancy. These statistics do not jive with images women are fed of early motherhood, which convey that this period should be the happiest of a woman’s life. Nevermind the near unavoidable gender disparity caused by breastfeeding, healing from the oft traumatic experience of childbirth, or having to temporarily (or permanently) pause one's career to provide childcare. As Hoover astutely writes at the end of the first chapter:
And while my mental breakdown was embarrassing at times, especially considering how it exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool, it also showed how pernicious it is to sell tales of motherhood being so distinctly wonderful and feminine: the very essence of womanhood! It wasn’t all totally my fault, you know?
I’d been misled.
Misled, indeed. I won’t give away what happens at the end of The Motherload. However, I will say that in coming around to feel compassion for Hoover—along with excitement, horror, and pride—I developed more of these feelings for myself as a mother. We do mothers (and the people who love them) no favors when we ask mothers to silence their complaints, slap smiles onto their weary faces, or, most of all, judge them for falling short of impossible standards that were never designed to support and cherish the women who give forth life.
