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Today we’re speaking with the writer, art historian, and cultural critic Sarah Hoover, whose book, “The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood” is out this week, published by Simon and Schuster. I was lucky enough to get a galley of the book and could not put it down. Hoover’s brilliant, insightful, vulnerable, and witty essays first lured me in as a fangirl a couple years ago when she wrote for Vogue about the need for the end of the Baby Shower. Her words on the experience of motherhood—often traumatic—are wildly honest and insanely relatable, making any reader feel like an instant bestie who GETS IT, saying the scary parts outloud because we didn’t know we could or should or where to start.


You may know Hoover as I did as an art world fixture first, she worked in galleries at the beginning of her career and we’ve interviewed her in Whitewall around her knowledge and love of art and New York. Her experience of birth and motherhood, as she writes about in “The Motherload” created a seismic shift in her identity—one that she grapples with over the course of the book and her writings elsewhere in places like Harper’s Bazaar, Psychology Today, Mother Tongue and more. She has a wonderful Substack where she shares her art history insights as they relate to feminism and culture today.
I spoke with Hoover as she was doing the final edits of her book. We talk about her start in the art world in New York, how motherhood impacted her mental health, the creative process of writing, and her hope that her getting it all down could help at least one reader to feel less alone. It’s the book she wishes she could have read, and I simply cannot recommend it enough.


Notable Insights:
“Witnessing the perspective of other people is really the only way that you can become an empathetic person. I don’t think I would have grown up to be sympathetic if I hadn’t had access to looking at art and reading books.”
“Artists are outside-of-the-box thinkers, and I feel like it’s only through that lens that you can solve incredibly complex problems that aren’t just about politics, but about humanity and the way people live their lives.”
“The biggest gift of writing is that I get to take all the ideas sitting in my brain and give birth to them in a way that feels really good. Even if I lived in a vacuum, I would still be writing because the process itself is so fulfilling.”
“So much of our impetus toward change comes from art and creative thinkers. Our ability to imagine a better world, better conditions for everyone in it, is instigated by artists.”
“After I processed my pain and worked to own the narrative, I realized I could communicate it better. I’m not still firsthand traumatized, but I can talk about what was traumatic in a way that might help someone else feel seen.”
Resources:
To read more about Sarah Hoover, visit HERE.
To order Sarah’s book, visit HERE.