‘I thought I absolutely hated being a mum and was a failure of a woman’

I wrote the book I wish I had had,” says Sarah Hoover. After the former art director’s first child was born, she suffered a terrifying year of postpartum depression. Her memoir, The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood, tells it all. And she hopes it will help other women to navigate the cataclysmic life change that is becoming a mother.

“I was excited to give people a story I thought might be helpful,” says Hoover, between mouthfuls of salad in a Notting Hill café. “I had been craving something like this.”

Her book describes, in captivating detail, the sense of “alienation” from everything that motherhood is supposed to entail – like bonding with her baby – as well as the nightmare of psychosis, which for her manifested in repeated visualisations of dropping her baby. It also describes her partying to get through the dark times – a “mask for everything else”.

“I thought I absolutely hated being a mum,” she says plainly. “And I thought I was a total failure of a woman, because I was not, in my mind, a good fit for it – my maternal instincts didn’t kick in. It’s not like I had a baby and I fell in love with him, and all of a sudden I became a mother.”

Although Hoover knew that something was amiss, it took her a while to identify, especially given the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS) test she took. After all, she did not have the symptoms as listed; there was no endless crying, unwashed hair, or inability to get out of bed. It was more complicated.

“I didn’t feel successful at mothering or fulfilled by doing it. I felt no joy,” she recalls. “I didn’t know what I had, I just thought this was what it was like to be a mum, that you never get joy again.”

A former gallery director at the prestigious Gagosian in New York and professor of art history, married to artist Tom Sachs, Hoover had an enviable career pre-motherhood.

Hoover grew up in conservative, Christian Indiana knowing she was Jewish. She attended a bilingual Hebrew academy, and enjoyed “all sorts of Jewish foods” including chopped liver, made by her maternal grandparents. “Obviously my favourite food is a potato latke, because I’m human,” she says.

She fondly recalls her grandparents teaching her what Judaism looked like in immigrant communities in New York, where they had lived, and how her grandfather hung salamis in his garage because he missed Jewish delis.

“I don’t write about my Jewish identity in the book. But now I have kids, I think about it more and more,” she says.

The day Hoover decided to write her trauma down in a book and explain just how hard her early experience of motherhood had been, she wrote with optimism in her journal: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”.

A baby came out of a hole in my body. I couldn’t fit into my clothes. My husband disappointed me. Of course I was depressed

Today, she says, “I think part of the depression is a rational response to an insane thing that happens in a world that does not respect motherhood or fully acknowledge how difficult it is to be a woman. Nothing about our world makes it easy for mothers. A baby came out of a hole in my body, I had this huge rupture to my identity. I couldn’t fit into my clothes. My husband disappointed me. Of course I was depressed.”

Hoover hopes that women reading her book will hear that a full range of feelings about motherhood is natural, and that they too can come to love mothering and find fulfilment in it. However, they should acknowledge the parts that make them unhappy and figure out ways to fix them. Honesty about what you’re really feeling, she says, is essential.

“I was afraid to complain for a long time,” she says. “I thought that made me a poorly behaved woman, and I kept it all inside. I want women to know you can come through the other side.”

The book opens with the kind of lavish party, private swimming pool, and room service at Hollywood’s infamous Chateau Marmont, a scene which most mothers can only dream about. In fact, it has been a source of consternation for some women, with one pointing out on social media that unlike most mothers, Hoover “had endless help, excellent healthcare, access to plenty of resources, nannies, doulas, etc, and could focus on recovery instead of worrying about work, money, or childcare so I don’t know how relatable or helpful her story will be for the average new mother going through hell.” And indeed, in her book Hoover asks: “How dare I let myself be this miserable when I was so deeply fortunate?”

Today, she acknowledges her privilege – and that depression is indiscriminate. “I feel all the time like I shouldn’t be allowed to complain, but if I had all of those things and I was still ready to take my own life, then it’s not easier for anyone else,” she says quietly. “I feel it’s my duty to complain, because I’m not embarrassed by it, and many are. It’s more important to encourage a world that I want my kids to grow up in, where people can talk about their truth without shame. You can’t change it by hiding it so you might as well talk about it, in case it like helps empower someone else to.”

Hoover’s writing has a number of high-profile fans including Emma Roberts, Nicole Ritchie and Busy Philipps, but she is especially interested in the women whose own experiences with maternal mental health mean they have been profoundly impacted by her book. After a book event, she had a woman in her 70s tell her she had never heard anyone talk about feeling disconnected from their child after a traumatic birth – something she herself had experienced 50 years earlier. She had never received treatment, and it was only on hearing Hoover that she realised postnatal depression could be why she has never managed a good relationship with her firstborn son.

“That’s so unacceptable, and so sad,” Hoover says. “We want women to avoid the fact that an experience in a hospital can steal your capacity to love and to teach others how to love. That really stuck with me and speaks to how disillusioned most of the women I meet are with the way culture treats mothers.”

She has also written the book for her second child, her daughter, now a year old, because it is so important for girls to hear these stories.

“I don’t think change happens through silence. I spent so much of my life feeling shame about everything and I don’t want her to go through that. So much of that occurred because of patriarchy and the systems we live in. Look, I don’t think I’m changing the world, but I’m changing my own little corner of it.”

Things are different for Hoover today. She is now fully connected to mothering, and “mad for” her daughter. Because her traumatic first birth was a catalyst for her postpartum depression, she hoped that giving birth again would be healing. It took a while to fall pregnant the second time, which is why there are seven years between her two children.

“I find myself now obsessed with being a mum, and it’s funny because it has overlapped with this book coming out into the world,” she says. “It’s the most passionate I’ve ever felt about my professional life.”

Of course, she is simultaneously struck by how “incompatible” working at her current level is with having children. On this book tour alone she has missed her daughter’s first steps. “All this talk about leaning in and having it all… you can’t,” she sighs.

Still, however “obsessed” she is with her children, she has never been able to give up the part of her identity that loves work. And why should she? Although she has swapped working for an art gallery for the self-employed life of a writer. “A lot of aspects of my identity switched,” she says. “And the most startling one is I actually love being a mother.”

The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood , published by Simon and Schuster, is out now