What To Read

In The Motherload, art historian Sarah Hoover shatters the myths of motherhood via a raw, unapologetic look at postpartum depression. With irreverent humor and brutal honesty, she lays bare her struggles with rage, guilt, and the loss of identity following the birth of her son. Hailed as a “long-overdue reality check” by Oprah Daily, this motherhood memoir has been chosen by Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss to kick off the new year selection for the Belletrist book club.

Read on for an excerpt from the book.

YOU’RE IN LABOR. You need to go directly to the hospital, my doctor said, looking straight at me.

I can’t, I told her, wiping the sonogram gel off my big, round belly. I have an appointment at Bergdorf’s to get highlights, and it’s impossible to reschedule with Jennifer. She’s there only two days a week because she has young kids, and look at me, I’m desperate. If you get close, you can see premature GRAYS. I leaned my head toward her, presenting my hairline, where I’d found suspiciously pale hairs before. It would be fine: everything on the Upper East Side is practically a twelve-minute walk from everything else, and Bergdorf’s was just a few blocks down Fifth Avenue. I could go get my hair done and then go have my baby.

My doctor looked at me. I don’t think you understand, she said. You thought you peed in your pants last night at four a.m. By the time you finish with your hair, it will be eight p.m., and you will have been open to the world with a torn amniotic sac for all those hours, she continued, writing something down in her chart while the nurse nodded behind her.

My roots won’t take that long, I explained. I started preparing for my stroll, climbing off the exam table and putting on my shoes, flats I’d had to buy a full size up because of how swollen I’d become in the third trimester. It usually takes me about an hour and a half or two hours, depending on if I get a trim. I can just meet you then.

I felt completely nonchalant. It was a beautiful early-October day, still warm and sunny, and I was in a minidress I’d bought in a size much larger than normal and tailored to be as short as possible. I felt like Rosemary Woodhouse from Rosemary’s Baby. A walk in the deep fall sun, down the side of Central Park, with my giant belly and still-tanned summer legs and long pregnancy hair sounded gorgeous.

The doctor snapped me out of it: Sarah, no. You’re not listening. Think about it. It’s dangerous for your baby; you need antibiotics, she said with finality. You’ve been open to the world for far too long. You’ll be hooked up to an IV within the next hour and a half.

We argued back and forth. I couldn’t imagine pushing out this little alien with my hair dirty. I’d done my morning dance cardio and hadn’t shampooed afterward. It would all be a much happier experience for me if I could at least get a blowout. We settled on a compromise: I’d go to the blow-dry bar near NewYork- Presbyterian, the hospital where my doctor worked, while Tom went to fetch my overnight bag, and then I’d be on a gurney, laboring under her watch.

I waddled down Seventy-Seventh Street to get my blow-dry from a random walk-in hair salon, dripping something into my undies the entire time. I could see the hospital from the hairdresser’s chair, its old ivy-covered brick walls, perched right over the FDR Drive. It looked like an asylum from a bygone era, built to house hysterical Victorian women in floor-length white nightgowns. It looked like the kind of place women went to get tied into straitjackets and hooked down into beds, injected with sedatives against their will. It looked like the kind of place women walked into and were never heard from again, leaving young children and best girlfriends behind to wonder whatever became of them.

I sat on a rock wall at the edge of the hospital entrance, hunching over my belly, and inspected a small rose garden while I called Augusta and cried.

I don’t want to go in, Auggie. I’m so scared. I stared at the scraggly plants, left over from the summer, holding on to their last, tenuously lived moments in the sun. I could relate. I thought about my friend in med school, herself already a mother, who’d said, It’s the most dangerous day of your life and your baby’s life when you give birth. And my sister, she’d already been through one birth, and she didn’t even get a living baby at the end of it, just a beautiful little boy with full blue lips and a cold body. I could feel mine kicking around inside me, alive, jamming my upper hip bone area on repeat—a reminder that my problems seemed stupid in comparison to hers, just a little bit of pain compared to a lifetime of grief.

What are you scared of? Augusta asked me, seemingly surprised that I wasn’t more excited. I never took the birthing class, I sniffled. I—I don’t know any relaxation techniques. I should have told her I was scared of needles. Scared of the epidural. Scared of pushing. Scared of tearing. Scared of dying. Scared of my baby dying. Scared of my baby living. Scared of not being pregnant anymore, something I was just getting the hang of. Scared of becoming a mom. Scared of never being myself again. Scared of all the ways Tom would disappoint me. Scared of all the ways I would disappoint Tom. Scared I’d love my child so much that it wouldn’t be worth it—wouldn’t be worth the potential immeasurable devastation of something bad happening to him.

Excerpted from THE MOTHERLOAD: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood by Sarah Hoover. Copyright © 2025 by Bang Bang, LLC. Reprinted by permission of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.