Rage Against the Maternal: A Review of Sarah Hoover's Memoir, The Motherload

 
 

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.

 
 

Read Our Review Of Kim-Anh Schreiber's New Book Fantasy

text by Summer Bowie

When planning a pregnancy or discussing the process of birth, we often hear about the rebirth that the mother experiences—her renaissance as woman with child, giver of life, and newborn unto herself. It’s such a beautiful image when you ignore the suicide that was planned for the woman who once was. Thus is the balance of life and death, and it's one that some of us contend with more readily than others. Nothing is more apparent than this in Kim-Anh Schreiber’s Fantasy, wherein the book’s titular figure is the daughter of a mother who never stops mourning the life she should have had; her inescapable Karma. 

This cross-genre novel is a disembodied lung desperately inflating and deflating itself with stale cigarette smoke and the decades-old dust of whatever room you’re sitting in. It’s a work of autofiction that is equally exposed and pregnable as it is a fictitious hallucination woven like a cosmic braid with scenes from Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 film, House. The intergenerational sorority of aunts, mother, and grandmother that represent the author’s Vietnamese refugee matrilineage become interchangeable with Obayashi’s highly Westernized depiction of archetypal Japanese schoolgirls and the dubious matriarchs who haunt them. The spaces within the house hold formative and traumatic memories alike. They contain cultures of sexually repressed, sisterly perversions that are devoid of sexuality, yet brimming with desire. Schreiber is wont to illustrate scenes in much the same way as Obayashi—little comedic horrors that drip with Agent Orange and irradiated uranium (respectively) over postwar rubble both seen and unseen. House makes a perfect companion for this book in the way that it depicts the domicile as a metaphor for the body. A cell that contains the bodies of all the women who have kept it.

In Fantasy, mother tongue is laced with the mysterious motherland in a braid that spans the Pacific Ocean. A language spoken between grandmother and granddaughter flourishes and fades in this boat they call home, its orbit so wide one forgets that it’s indeed moving. Only her mother’s constant motion is detected as she skirts in and out on an outlet designer dingy, leaving an inexplicably large wake each time on her way out. You can trace the roots of words that have died in the wisps that fly out of one loop or the next, having provided the foundation of their intercontinental bridge, they take an unceremonious bow and quietly escape the lexicon of their nomadic identity. “Ever since I was a little girl, I have lived in a fantastic theatron: a seeing place whose walls keep disappearing, transforming to mask, fly, tease, or torment, and beyond the walls are nothingness, and three generations of women live with me, entering through the door to rehearse their magical future, every character brought down by their character, by the desire to look good as themselves for themselves, and I alone see them, I alone beholding my house, my body, my ghosts and my gods, and my screen that is suddenly a cannibal.”

Am I really so porous that someone could just bleed into me? asks Khaos, a recurring figure whose only identifying characteristics are Daughter Flower, pregnant. Flowers constitute the form of certain characters at times, nourish them at others, and press their withering bodies into the pages of a history book from a forgotten land. Having meticulously studied a smorgasbord of allegories that portray women stuck in houses such as Mekong Hotel, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Pretty Little Liars, The Virgin Suicides, and so on, Schreiber takes an incisive look at the corporal quality of our deepest psychic understandings and the umbilical cord that carries our identity from one body to the next. She is indefatiguably distinguishing one X from the other in her chromosomal set, knowing that there isn’t a corpus callosum dividing her dual identities, but rather an extensive sequence of yins and yangs swirling; an infinite loop of chain-smoking daisies propelling the turbine of life and death. Like the avatars of an ancient goddess, they circulate the dust that gathers in the corners of the epigenetic house, floating ubiquitously through the air, carrying traces of every dead and living thing that ever graced it with their presence.

Fantasy features cover art by Sojourner Truth Parsons and is published by Sidebrow Books. Click here to preorder. Follow Kim-Anh Schreiber on Instagram.

Read Claressinka Anderson Pugliese's Poetic Response to Fay Ray's "I Am The House" @ Shulamit Nazarian →

I AM THE HOUSE continues Ray’s interest in the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochromatic photomontages and suspended metallic sculptures. Throughout this series, she situates the body as a vessel, one that carries life, physical memories, and emotional fortitude. Read Claressinka Anderson Pugliese's poetic response here. See additional photographs from the exhibition here. photograph by Lani Trock

Exclusive Premiere of "Screen Test n.11: Romantic Love" by Alex Franco Featuring Poet and Model Greta Bellamacina

The short-film and intimate spoken word snapshot, entitled Screen Test n.11: Romantic Love, by photographer and filmmaker Alex Franco, features English poet and model Greta Bellamacina sprawled out, reading her poem Romantic Love. Bellamacina, who just had her first child with fellow artist and poet Robert Montgomery, says that the poem is from a series that explores the “early stages of motherhood from a young female contemporary perspective,” which is a perspective that is “massively under represented in the media today.” The poem, Romantic Love, is inspired by Lucien Freud’s 2002 painting Naked Portrait, which features a pregnant Kate Moss softly laying her head on her own arm in an intimate setting with a maternal glow. Bellamacina, who is a lingual portraitist that uses deeply powerful rhythms of language to paint her poems, plans to release a book of poetry later this month called Stockholm Syndrome. Click here to read the poem. Poem by Greta Bellamacina @ VIVA Model Management. Film by Alex Franco @ Artist and Agency .