Latest news with #SarahHoover
Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
‘My baby is ugly' — a candid warning about the horrors of motherhood
There has been a lot of brutally honest writing about motherhood in the 24 years since Rachel Cusk's memoir A Life's Work blew the whole maternal contentment racket wide open. The taboos on anxiety, depression, milk and gore are long gone. The only thing that might shock now would be a literary writer declaring her joy in having a baby. Even so, it's a surprise to read a woman admitting, as Sarah Hoover does in Motherload, to finding her baby 'ugly' and impossible to bond with. In her son, Guy, Hoover sees 'all my worst traits: weird eyes and big ears'. She writes that he 'meant as much to me as a stone-cold marble statue in the antiquities section of an art museum — aka something that I knew was valuable but not so much to me'. Hoover, 40, is a former director of the Gagosian gallery in New York, where she lives with her husband, the artist Tom Sachs. When they met in 2007 he was 41 and established, while she was a 23-year-old gallery assistant. For Hoover, anxious about her status, marriage represented 'my little power trip, a small corner I could control in the grand design of our relationship'. They married in 2012 and in 2017 Guy arrived. In retrospect the warning signs were clear. Hoover suffered from nausea during her pregnancy to the point that just thinking about lettuce could make her retch. Her labour was slow and agonising, the baby's spine pressing against hers with each contraction. Her husband was distracted by his work and emotionally unfaithful. On top of that the medical care she received was often not caring. When she asked a doctor about her relentless sickness, she was told to tolerate the 'discomfort' because 'you're nothing but a house for your baby for ten months'. The birth was even worse: the same doctor (a woman) manually broke Hoover's waters with little warning or explanation, causing 'pain so deep inside my body that I didn't even know it could hurt there'. For Hoover, this violation recalled every physical assault she had ever suffered, from groping to rape (Guy was born in the same week that Harvey Weinstein's abuses were exposed). 'I don't think I'll ever be able to reconcile that I'm supposed to allow medical instruments and penises inside this same cavity and just turn off the different emotions that each provokes,' she writes. A misandrist rage consumed her. She was angry all the time, especially at her husband. Instead of love for her son she felt terrible, overbearing fear: 'Every night, in my dreams, I watched the baby die … he'd be shot by snipers, thrown onto the train tracks, burnt up in a house fire.' Intrusive thoughts like these are relatively common among new mothers (I used to be haunted by the idea of dropping my baby down the stairs to my flat), but Hoover's were so ceaseless and vivid she came to think of them as a form of psychosis. • We need to tell the truth about what motherhood does to women Hoover is a great narrator of her descent, often funny and never self-exculpatory. 'My breakdown,' she writes, 'was embarrassing at times, especially considering how it exposed me as a puerile and spoiled little fool.' Without that caustic note it might indeed be hard to sympathise with a woman who could afford to hire a full-time, live-in nanny so she could escape into getting high as much of the time as possible. A particular low came when Hoover was dragged out to accompany her husband to a Guggenheim gala — she prepared for the art world's big night out by mixing mushrooms with the opioid Vicodin. Her post-pregnancy boobs broke the zip of her dress and her infuriated husband was left hissing: 'People are looking. Tracey Emin is looking. Your butt's out.' After this she rented a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles and took more drugs. The only point where Hoover lost me is when she got to the nub of her complaint, which is this: 'Birth and motherhood did not match up to the narrative I'd been fed and it felt like a nasty trick … I'd been misled.' Misled by whom, though? Where is the lie of motherly joy coming from? Certainly not from memoirs, which are dominated by unhappy domesticity. In the past couple of years alone, the poet Maggie Smith (You Could Make This Place Beautiful) and writer Leslie Jamison (Splinters) have taken on the Cusk mantle with their stories of maternal frustration and marital collapse. Surely no well-read young woman could come away with the idea that becoming a mother is a painless process. When Cusk published A Life's Work in 2001, one reviewer wrote, 'If everyone were to read this book, the propagation of the human race would virtually cease.' For what it's worth, I suspect there's a link between the rise of the motherhood misery memoir and the decline in fertility rates, but I think that it runs in the opposite direction. It's not that women are avoiding having children because they are reading these books. They are reading these books because they don't want to have children. Stories of lost selves, shattered relationships and wrung-out bodies are most appealing as a reminder of what you've avoided: this is some other poor cow's fate, not yours. Hoover writes that she had no interest in having a child until she and her husband decided to have one. Even if she did pay attention to what other women were saying about pregnancy, why would she — a person with no intention of getting pregnant — apply it to herself? All the warnings in the world mean little if you don't think they are addressed to you. • 'Negative tales of motherhood nearly put me off having a baby' For a quarter of a century the dominant mode of writing about motherhood has been negative. I have no ideological beef with the genre, 'but if its aim was to inform other women that a woman of Hoover's intelligence and education can still claim ignorance about the tough side of maternity, then that suggests it has failed.' please change to but if its aim was to warn the mothers to come, then you have to say that it's failed if a woman of Hoover's intelligence and education can still claim ignorance about the tough side of maternity. With the support of a therapist, Hoover was eventually able to confront her past and her not-so-loyal husband. 'Now I was glad to say I saw all men, all people, as unique entities capable of their own special brands of shitty and loving behaviours,' she writes. She also realises that her fears for Guy mean she probably always did love him through her crack-up. She feels, finally, like a mother — not just someone with a baby — and she finds purpose in being an advocate for better care for women. 'I will not stop talking about this until the end of time,' she writes. That's laudable, but my fear is if Hoover wasn't listening to Cusk et al for all those years, will anyone listen to Hoover now? The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood by Sarah Hoover (Simon & Schuster £20 pp352). To order a copy go to Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Times
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
‘Motherhood is all-out f***ing war'
In a rented bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, a party is in full swing. It is a late afternoon in August 2018 and the gates to the property are tied with big balloons. Inside, tables are strewn with crayons, paper and cigarettes. The guests, briefed beforehand with invites that read 'No gifts, unless it's drugs', have duly complied. Their host, Sarah Hoover, is wearing a bum-skimming dress embroidered with red mouths smoking cigarettes and she has been sloshing white wine into her glass since noon. The crayons and primary-coloured balloons are a nod to the party's theme. This is a post-baby shower Hollywood style. Hoover's ten-month-old son, Guy, is passed from lap to lap as appetisers and bottles of vodka and tequila do the rounds,
Daily Mail
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Socialite's sister accuses her of sharing details about pregnancy loss against her will in memoir
The sister of a popular socialite has accused her of sharing intimate details about her tragic pregnancy loss against her will in her new memoir. Sarah Hoover - an art consultant, influencer, and the wife of artist Tom Sachs - released her debut book The Motherload: Episodes from the Brink of Motherhood back in January. Described as 'an unflinching motherhood memoir that dares to ask what happens when "what to expect when you're expecting" turns out to be months of rage, anguish, brain fog, and a total surrender of sex, career, and identity,' the tome quickly rose in popularity. But now, someone who claimed to be Sarah's estranged sister has unleashed a furious tirade against it, in which she alleged that Sarah included a segment describing the moment her son was born stillborn - despite her requesting that Sarah not talk about it publicly. The woman, who did not share her name, slammed Sarah's book in a scathing post on Reddit, entitled, 'Am I the a**hole for wanting to hold my sister accountable for publishing information about my private trauma where my baby boy died without asking me?' In the lengthy post, the woman explained that she lost her son nine years ago during childbirth. 'Nine years ago I lost a baby boy in childbirth at 41 weeks who was stillborn,' she wrote. 'This really f**ked me up, like to the point that it still makes me very sad after nine years.' The woman explained that about four years after the tragedy, Sarah spoke about it during an interview with 'an internationally read magazine' while discussing her own journey to motherhood. 'She included very private details and information about my son who died and my stillbirth - medical information and other things I would never have agreed to share,' the woman wrote on Reddit. 'She did not ask my permission and did not give me any warning ahead of time.' In a 2021 essay for Vogue, Sarah said, '[My sister's] little boy was dead on his due date, and she was nursing the wounds of her emergency c-section; a scar with nothing to show for it. 'We counted his fingers and toes and made ink prints of his feet and kissed his head until he turned cold and stopped smelling like a baby. 'He was buried the following week next to his paternal grandfather, dressed in the outfit my mom had bought him in Paris, a white Peter Pan collar and blue velvet pants, which he had been meant to wear home from the hospital.' On Reddit, the woman said she 'was very triggered' reading the article and had 'an emotional breakdown' afterwards. 'It was the idea that all these strangers were reading about my private life and had access to information that I would never have shared with them - it made me feel first of all like I was back in the moments after my son died and secondly, like I was being continually re-traumatized by all these people reading about it without my consent,' she added. 'Acquaintances/work colleagues/etc. who I never told about this experience started asking me about it and trying to talk to me about it - people who I would not have shared with about my private life in that level of detail.' She said she told Sarah she thought it was wrong and they ended up having a 'huge fight' about it - and have 'essentially not spoken since.' She claimed that Sarah did not apologize, but vowed that 'she would ask her permission if she were ever to write about it again' the last time they spoke. Flash forward to now, however, and the woman has claimed that the influencer, who has racked up more than 54,000 followers on Instagram, included the story of her stillbirth in her new memoir. 'I knew that she was publishing a book, but I assumed per our last communication that she would not include information about my son's death or anything about my family in the book. Well, I was wrong,' she continued. 'I am very angry again at the inclusion of my life and my son's death ... I did not read a draft and did not give permission or consent for what was included.' The woman also accused her of 'lying' in the book, claiming that her retelling of the events weren't 'accurate.' 'She says she held my son in the hospital and while I was very out of it emotionally I am certain to the point where I would die on the hill that she never held my son,' she wrote. 'She says she held him while he was "still warm" which also seems impossible since no one held him directly out of my uterus and he was dead and logically could not be warm. 'I know these things only matter to me and don't matter to the general point of her book's narrative. 'But, when the only the only way you get to be a mom to your son is through those very few memories you have, it feels like a really big deal for someone to do this.' She concluded the post by admitting that she was considering taking legal action against her sister, and asked Reddit users if they thought she would be in the wrong for doing so. 'Would I be the a**hole if I tried to take legal action? Is there a perspective where I am the a**hole for being angry about this?' she asked. 'Do people think what she did is not such big deal? My family is kind of split on this and my parents are very complicit in her behavior and actions and have been very supportive of her and the book. 'I also feel bad that this has destroyed our once very close family and my parents are getting older.' has reached out to Sarah for comment. Sarah's publicist told Page Six that they wouldn't comment on the matter because it was 'a family matter,' but said: 'As a memoirist, Sarah writes from her memory and her lived experience.' Sarah has gained fame for her 'essays on pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood,' per her bio. The Vogue piece - which focused on 'the traumatic birth of her son and ensuing postpartum depression' - was what shot her into the spotlight.
