Honor Your Truth: A Conversation with Sarah Hoover
Sarah Hoover, author of the memoir The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood, is also an essayist; art historian; cultural critic; educator; consultant for the art, dance, literary, fashion, food, and nonprofit worlds; and mother. Her essays have been published in Vogue, The Strategist, Mother Tongue, and more. She lives in New York City with her husband and their two children: Guy, age seven, and Fred, almost nine months.
In an interview with Tess Clarkson over Zoom, Hoover spoke about her postpartum depression (PPD) and recovery, and how both inspired her memoir. The conversation has been edited for content and clarity.
Tess Clarkson: In The Motherload, you write about your PPD. You’re candid about your inability to love your son after he was born and your need to heal grief and rage beneath your sadness. Why did you feel it was important to write about these topics?
Sarah Hoover: It felt important because I had a year of my life stolen from me. I couldn’t function as a member of society, I couldn’t function as a mother, and I wasn’t a good partner to my husband. A book like this would have made me feel less alone. I could have recognized that something wasn’t right sooner … [and] asked for help. I wanted to provide that [book] for other people. I wanted to tell the most emotionally honest tale I could. I felt maybe this was going to end up cringe or embarrassing or TMI—I’m bad at being a mom, I’m bad at being a woman, I’m bad at being polite—and it probably is all those things, but if I had just one of these chapters to read when I was feeling the way I did, I’d have been like, “Okay, this isn’t just hard for me, it’s hard for everyone.” If I’d felt a little bit seen by somebody, it would have made all the difference. [So,] I wrote [my memoir] because I had to, but I pursued publishing it because I thought maybe it would help others.
TC: In The Motherload, you show how your PPD touched every area of your life. Can you share how PPD impacted you?
SH: I’d been sold this idea of motherhood being magical from movies, my friends, and every woman I ever talked to who had a baby. They all told me the same thing—pregnancy is really hard, but also, it’s the most magical time of your life; and labor really hurts, but the minute the baby is born and on your body, you fall magically in love. [But for me,] when they pulled the baby out and put him on my body, I felt nothing. I shut down. I was completely detached. When I got home from the hospital, I had help with our son, but I was struggling all the while. I couldn’t find any joy. I couldn’t find any level of pleasure or attachment to him, and it wasn’t love that drew me to him but a sense of duty and obligation. I’m lucky that I never wanted to hurt him or anything like that. I had incredible anxiety about his health and care. I would have been fine with it if I had died or floated away and not existed anymore. It seemed like a way to get out of the situation. I’d produced this offspring that changed my life irrevocably, and everything felt like a heavy obligation from which I would never escape, and to me in my sick brain, the only escape felt like running away from life.
TC: What advice do you have for other mothers struggling after the birth of a child?
SH: Identify that it is a struggle. It was hard for me to admit that because it felt like admitting to my own failing. It’s sometimes easier to smile and pretend things are okay, hoping that they’ll magically become okay. So my advice is: Admit how hard it’s going and be honest with yourself about it. Write down how you feel, even if it’s just in your journal for six minutes a day. I found that the more I wrote about my struggle, the easier it became to talk about it. When someone I trusted finally said, “how are you really?”, I had the words—I’m miserable. If I hadn’t practiced saying that in my head and writing it down, I probably would have been too scared to say it.
At a certain point, you can’t worry about feeling shame about your struggle. You have to talk to other people. You have to find some sort of community, even if it’s therapy, which I understand is not available to everyone. Do the best you can to find other people to share your experience with. Not feeling alone was my first real tangible step to getting better.
TC: In The Motherload, the power of friendship is evident too. What role can friends play for sufferers of PPD?
Sometimes with friends who I’ve suspected have PPD, the way I’ve noticed isn’t because they seem sad or different, it’s because they seem determined to convince me that they’re happy. If you have friends who you suspect are going through PPD, reassure them. Explain that they’re not themselves because they went through something life-altering. Things are always changing with motherhood, and you do feel trapped by this new identity you made for yourself, but you have to recognize that it’s going to shift again a million times in your life. I wish someone had been able to say that to me. Some sort of message of reassurance that it wasn’t permanent would have been really nice to hear.
Also, the drugs. I wish more friends were honest about their experiences with antidepressants because a light bulb could have gone off. People are not particularly forthright about their mental health history, about what meds they’re on. People act like it’s this shameful thing. But it’s not. It’s one of many tools to get you better. I was resistant to the idea of taking antidepressants. Since I was a kid, I’d heard about them only in a negative way. I didn’t have experience talking to any successful, functioning adult who was on them. If I had, I might have gotten help sooner.
TC: What do you hope your children, Guy and Fred, learn from your memoir if they read it one day?
SH: I want their takeaway to be, “My mom told the truth, and therefore it’s okay for me to be honest—with myself and with others—about how I feel.” I want my kids to not feel the shame that I did in hiding my feelings. I want them to go straight to the honest part, knowing it’s okay to say how you feel about things that are hard for you.
TC: What do you wish you were asked about your book or experience that you haven’t been asked?
What made you do it again? Guy is now seven, and I have a newborn. I waited a long time. And then when I tried, it took me forever to get pregnant. When I finally got there, I was incredibly sick and on mandatory medical bedrest, yet I was not depressed. I wanted to give myself an opportunity to do pregnancy without the trauma, knowing more, being in control, demanding more for myself, and making it the experience that I knew it could be, that other people had told me it had been for them. I’d figured out what I needed from doctors in the hospital, from my partner, and to feel safe. As horrible as it was the first time, I’m so glad I did it again. I changed my world, and now I can tell other people that’s possible.
I don’t want anyone to feel I’m speaking for all moms or all people who have babies. I can only tell my story. I only know what my experience was like. I think there are plenty of women who never feel sad, alienated, or lonely in the process of having kids, and it’s only a joy for them, and I don’t want to take that joy away from them. I wrote this [memoir] for people who don’t feel that way. I want to make it a little easier for everyone to honor their truth, whatever it looks like.
TC: In The Motherload, you often reference journaling and how your memoir grew from [journal] entries. Can you speak about how you developed your book?
SH: I journal every morning when I wake up and have for a long time. Ninety percent of the time, it’s a to-do list and not anything profound. But writing a book is very different from writing in your diary. Obviously, there’s a structure to a book, which I didn’t know about until I wrote a book (I was buying “writing books for dummies” to educate myself!). Luckily, I take a weekly writing class, and the teacher of it is also a book doula. She really helped me (shout-out to Emily Stone!). Having a teacher, a community, or a class will help you get to the finish line.
My book also explores sexual assault, depression, and topics filled with shame, fear, sadness, and grief. I talked about them in therapy and journaled about them for so long that I now have control over them. They don’t have control over me. I think it’s hard to write a book that people can relate to when the emotions you’re portraying still have control over you. You have to be the boss of those feelings and drive them in the direction to tell the most compelling story.
TC: What do you hope readers take away from The Motherload?
SH: There are many ways to do motherhood and parenting right, but you can’t do any of them if you’re miserable and haven’t figured out why. You owe it to your kids and to yourself to figure your damage out, and you have to be strong to do it, because it sucks. That work is essential for any parent. Otherwise, you’re making mistakes that your kid will have to recover from. You make mistakes anyway, but they shouldn’t be because you didn’t do the work you needed to do on you.
On a bigger level, I hope readers take away that there’s always a place for emotional honesty.
Even if you suspect that it’s not what anybody else has felt, even if you think it might make you a monster, “you’re only as sick as your secrets” [as the Alcoholics Anonymous adage says]. It doesn’t harm you to live your truth. It makes you more adjusted and more in control of your destiny.
TC: What’s next for your literary career?
SH: I have two books I’m working on. I’m really interested in women’s stories and in the emotional lives of women, so they both center on that. One is a love story. (I know!) The other is about a specific time in the life of Sylvia Plath, who is a hero to me. I can’t promise you these books soon, but I’m always writing. I’m always thinking about what’s next. I want to write things that feel urgent and that no one else can do in the way I want done.