10-05-2025
‘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
