Memoir Author Sarah Hoover x Main Chapter

Sarah Hoover is celebrating the paperback release of her memoir, "The Motherload: Episodes From The Brink of Motherhood." Hoover's story shares about her non-textbook experience with postpartum depression and how it impacted her relationships, including her marriage. "The Motherload" has since been picked up for television adaptation, and the author shared her excitement while also talking about her writing process and special moments from her book tour. Motherhood is not a blanket experience, and this episode emphasizes the importance of representation, especially when it comes to mental health.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hello, my book butterflies, and welcome to this week's episode of the Main Chapter Podcast. I just got done interviewing Sarah Hoover about her memoir, The Mother Load, episodes from the brink of motherhood. And I know here at Main Chapter we do a lot of romance fiction, romanticy, but I think it's important we pick up a memoir and nonfiction every now and then, especially Sarah's, because it's all about postpartum depression, which is such an underrepresented topic in media and just conversations and society as a whole. Just this week on social media, I was seeing this polarization between moms who felt like they got their spark back after giving birth and those who haven't yet. And motherhood is so different for everyone that we need to show different stories, different experiences, more transparency. There needs to be more research as a whole. And her book probably highlights that. Even if you have not read her book, I think this is such an important conversation. We also talk about some exciting things like how her story is being picked up for adaptation for TV. And let's go ahead and get started with the interview. If you have not already, please be sure to like and subscribe so we can keep growing and spreading our love for books with the entire world. Yeah, so I read your book, and I'm not someone who reads memoirs a lot, but yours really fascinated me. And I thought it was such an important story. It's gotten a lot of attention from Vogue and New York Times. What was the main thing you wanted people to take away when you were writing it?

SPEAKER_02 1:32

Okay, well, first of all, thank you for reading, especially if memoir is not normally your genre. And I have to be honest, when I wrote The Mother Load, I mean, first of all, memoir wasn't really my genre either. Like the it wasn't uh the genre that I most enjoyed reading because I feel like a lot of times with memoir, especially with celebrity memoir, like they're not very literary, they don't really care about craft. It's more like reading like a biography, and you know, a lot of times they have ghostwriters and stuff. Um, but I chose instead of writing fiction because what I really wanted for people to take away was how empowering it can be to process and own the truth of what has happened to you in your life and how you can use your anger about your truth, your rage, your frustration with it to change yourself for the better and try and help the world around you, right? So, like my story is that I gave birth in 2017 to my firstborn child, and I had this terrible year-long postpartum depression that really threatened to like blow up my entire existence. And I thought if I wrote that story as fiction, there would be people who would read it and say, okay, but that's not really what it's like for someone to have postpartum depression. That's not really what it's like for someone to have been sexually assaulted in their life. That's not really what it's like to be a woman in this day and age. And I didn't want anyone to be able to say that. So I was like, even though memoir is not normally a genre that I love reading for several reasons, I'm gonna write my book as that, because then no one can say, well, this didn't happen to you. This wasn't real, you know? Um, because I really want people to read it and know how much potential lies within all of us for change and for being the best version of ourselves, as long as you like really can face your demons.

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Yeah. And I think your rage and all your emotional transparency is what makes your memoir so special. A big part of it is obviously your story about your birth, which was traumatic for you. And I was wondering, what was it like processing all that while also writing your story as well?

SPEAKER_02 3:46

Actually, I'm so glad you're asking this because I feel like this is really important. I am not one of those people who is like, while I was writing this book, I cried, it was so cathartic, I was processing everything at the same time. I didn't start writing this book until I had processed all of it. If in my opinion, in my experience, if you are writing while processing, you are journaling to give your audience what I believe an audience deserves, which is for you to be the master of your story and in control of where you want your story to go and what you want it to provide for people. I believe that you have to have processed your drama and your trauma before you start writing. I think I had spent three years in really intensive therapy before I even thought about writing because you know I had a whole different job before I wrote this book. I worked in the art world for many years. I had done all different kinds of therapy, I had journaled, um, and I had tried as hard as I could to face my demons so that when I started the process of turning this story into a book, I knew where I wanted it to go. I knew um what uh the lessons that I wanted people to be able to pull from it. And I knew exactly how I wanted it to be shaped. There was no moment when I was writing where I was like, this is so triggering for me. Like I had already worked through all of the triggers. And I felt like I could really shape the story properly for people that way and give my audience what they deserved, which was a fully formed story that that could aid them, at least in that's what I hope it does. You know, I don't know, I can't it's hard to tell if for yourself if you succeeded, but that was my aim. And so I just really feel like writers owe it to people to have processed their stuff outside of the actual writing, you know, to do that in an environment where you're meant to process things and writing can be part of that, but I think crafting a book is different than like writing for therapeutic aims.

SPEAKER_00 5:51

I love that perspective because writing for so many authors is therapeutic, but it can impact the final product. And you talk about journaling in your book and how your journals kind of led to this memoir and how you processed everything by the time you were writing it, but there was any but was there anything that was still hard for you to put onto the pages of your final product?

SPEAKER_02 6:12

Um, you know, when I I did my own audiobook, which not all authors choose to do, I felt like really excited about doing it because I think for one of the reasons is that, you know, I knew all of the characters in in the book. And I was like, no, no audiobook reader that they hire is gonna have met my mom. So like I need to do it myself, right? What I didn't realize is how like impactful the experience of reading it out loud was gonna be. And I remember there were there wasn't a part of the book that was like really hard to write. I there were parts that were hard to figure out exactly how to nail it, like when writing about my own mother, um, you know, my my goal when writing about other people aside from myself, like my husband or my mom, was to be as empathetic as possible. I felt like in order to be able to feel like I deserved to take the liberty of describing my experience with another human, I owed them like tremendous empathy and sympathy about their choices and their lives. Um, so it was like a little tricky to get those parts right. And I felt I really owed it to those people to like really get them right. But when I was reading the book out loud, I was really surprised there were some things that made me really emotional. Like I write in the book about how a sexual assault that I experienced in my 20s, I thought was really was brought up again by a traumatic childbirth. And when I was reading that out loud, like I cried in the audiobook recording. And the engineer was like, Do you want to redo this or do you want me to take out the parts where you're um audibly crying? And I was like, honestly, no, I think just leave it in because it's okay to have feelings about that. Like I felt like I mastered those feelings. You know, there was a time in my life when I couldn't even like say the words out loud that I was actually assaulted, I had so much shame or was so embarrassed, or the fact that they made me start crying. I mean, I would not be able to stop crying, you know, just thinking about those words would like send me into a spiral that it was hard to pull myself out of. So I was kind of proud of myself that I could read, A, that I could admit to all of this, that I could say it out loud, that I could read it out loud, that it could make me cry, and that I was okay with that. So even the parts that were hard in their own way felt like a triumph for me personally.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Yeah, that's such an accomplishment that you were able to share your story and read it because it is a lot different when you have to say things out loud and kind of relive them in a way. Your book is about to go in paperback and it's gonna be even more accessible to more people. I'm sure you've already had countless people reach out to you about your story, but is there any specific connection that sticks out in your mind through your experience so far?

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Yeah. Yeah, I went on um a tour when my hardback book came out in January of 2025. And I went to a bunch of different cities in America and I was in the UK also. And so I've met like, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of women at this point. Some of them, especially early in my tour, hadn't read my book yet, but were attracted to the themes in it. And like my main takeaway is that every woman that I encounter, everyone I think I've met in my life that I've, you know, connected with has some trauma, has some version of trauma. And they may not be moms or they may be moms in a different sense than I'm a mom, like they may not have given birth themselves or something like that. But I think we all have a story, you know, and it's really hard to live in this world unscathed by the pernicious effects of patriarchy, and it's just it's like it's hard to be a girl. And I I've I've I'm a repository for for stories of women's trauma because I think partially, you know, women perhaps trust me because I've been so open about mine. But routinely, if I do a book signing or a book event, women come up to me after and they tell me their birth story or their sexual assault story, and I feel like a real bank of these tales that women have endured. And something that like really shocked me to my core, A, I didn't know, you know, I felt so alone when I had postpartum depression, when I had been sexually assaulted. I felt like a freak who was the only person who had ever experienced these things. And as I went through my healing process, I of course learned that I wasn't a freak and that I wasn't alone. But I really learned it on book tour when I was meeting hundreds and hundreds of women who all had their sort of version of a very universal story. But I have one story in particular that really shook me, which was that a woman came up to me and she was in her 60s at least, and she was like, I never knew that I had postpartum depression until I read your book and read your description of postpartum depression, because it isn't exactly what the medical industry would have you believe postpartum depression looks like. Of course, the medical industry historically has been made up of like old white men, right? Who are creating these definitions for us. So she was like, looking back at my life, I think I had postpartum depression since my first son was born. I don't think I ever processed it or realized I had it, and I've never connected with that child. And like I'm in my late 60s now and it's been 35 years, and I never got the chance to connect with my kids because I think I've had this depression the whole time. And that really broke my heart because it just means that someone has lived like the majority of their life not understanding themselves and feeling not understood by the world, and it has impacted her relationship to her own mental health, undoubtedly, and to her child. And I think that's like a huge disservice. And you know, there's a lot of negative sides of like sharing your story with the world, like like you said in the beginning, my book has gotten a lot of attention, which is so fortunate because it means the message can get to more people, but like I didn't write it to get attention, and there are certainly like downsides to that too, you know.

SPEAKER_00 12:18

But at the end of the day, knowing that there are women out there who feel seen who have never felt seen before, and who can make positive change in their life because of that is feels like an incredible reward to me that was not intended, but yeah, that is such an emotional story, and I can't imagine how rewarding it was getting to experience a lot of these things in person and actually see the faces of the people you're impacting. You mentioned being how you felt alone, and you talk a lot about your marriage in your book and how you felt alone with your husband, and he helped encourage you to write and share your truth. But I was wondering, what was his reaction when he read your book for the first time and saw a lot of the things from your perspective?

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Well, first of all, my husband was like, You can make me sound as bad as you have to, like, make me sound worse than I was, no matter just tell a good story. It doesn't have to even be accurate. I want it to be entertaining for people and be fun for them to read. Um, because your message is so important. You want to make sure people are having a good time reading your book so that they get to the message part, you know? So make me sound really, really bad. And I was like, babe, I don't have to make you sound anything because you were the worst. Um, so we were kind of simpatico on him not wanting to hide things about himself or about what our relationship was like in that year and in the past. Um, but I do think like memoir is not, it's not a documentary, you know. Uh I I didn't have minute by minute notes of that phase of my life, and everybody remembers things differently. Like you and I will walk away from this interview in 10 minutes or whatever, and we'll have different memories of the exact same thing. And that's just life. Like it's not all recorded, and you don't have the play-by-play when you're going back. And that's why memoirs such can be so beautiful and can be so special because you're not, it's not a scientific, it's not a clinical document. It's the way someone remembers something and the way they remember feeling at that time. And that can be hazy for a number of reasons. And by the way, like I was mentally ill. I wrote a book from the perspective of a person who was mentally very ill who had had a psychotic break. So I think he, you know, didn't expect to remember every single detail the same way I remembered it. And also looking back, like it was an interesting reflection point for me because I realized the ways in which I was really hard to live with and I was really difficult. And you know, I think our takeaway, both of us, is like marriage is a beast. And we made a choice to continue to work on ours and to stay together, but like neither of us have been perfect angels in it. And I don't know, I I think that he was very generous in being like, write about me all you want. But honestly, had he said you can't write about me, I probably would have done it anyway because it felt so important to me. And that might have meant like the end of our relationship, but I don't know that I could be in a relationship with someone who wasn't supportive of me owning my truth anyway. That's a really important thing, I think, for a woman to be able to do. It's like a small act of rebellion in this world to just be able to like sit with yourself and be honest about your experiences, even if it's just to you, even if it's not to the outside world. And I think if I had a partner who didn't want that for me, it would be hard for me to trust them in other ways.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Yeah, support systems are definitely everything. I do want to take a couple minutes and switch gears a little bit and talk about how your book is being adapted for a television show, which is so exciting. I'm wondering, is it surreal to you to see that your life is going to be on screen?

SPEAKER_02 16:09

Yeah, it's really bizarre. I mean, I didn't think anyone would ever care about anything I ever did. So to think that people are going to be watching something based on my life, I'm like, are you guys sure? You sure you want to do that? Like pretty boring. But um, it's awesome because you know, I think it just proves something that I've come to believe, which is that every single person on this, like, I'm not special, I don't have some special life, I'm not a genius, I'm not even probably a great writer. I think that the thing that you could take away from this is that every person on this planet is in their uniqueness, is interesting. And and not every person gets the platform to tell their story, but we all have it within us to help affect change and to inspire other people in smaller big ways, and all of our stories are fabulous in their own in their own little way, and that mine somehow is chosen for for TV is so cool, but like everybody has their own lens and their own perspective and their own thing to say, and that's like once you realize that about the world, you can just become such a more curious, open person and and understand how everyone is so deserving of like time and energy and empathy. And so yeah, it's like it's really cool, but also I feel like there are a million people who could be in my seat who would be just as interesting, so yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Well, I thought you were a great storyteller. I read about 40 to 50 books a year, and I will be the first person to say that not every book can be adaptable to screen. And when I was reading yours, because I was like, oh, I could easily see this being a movie or a television show. Is there any particular chapter or moment from your memoir that you're interested to see how it translates to on screen? Oh, like the birth.

SPEAKER_02 18:09

Or anything, yeah, but the birth to um I'm like, how are they gonna do this without making it into a horror film? Um yes, I, you know, I like everyone else, I'm sure you too are watching uh a love story, the Carolyn Bassett TV show. And um, you know, some of my book is set earlier in the 2000s. I met my husband in 2007, and there's a chapter in my book about meeting him. And I'm like so nostalgic for for those other times before Instagram and the internet was crazy, and it just feels like such a different world, even in a decade. So I'm interested to kind of get to go back to the before times via television. Um, I am interested to see like who's gonna play my husband. I'm so curious. I don't know. I I what the great thing about going through this process with TV, and like you never know what's gonna happen in Hollywood, okay? Like, who knows if the show's ever gonna happen? But I'm learning so much, and it's so fascinating to see how they make decisions and how, you know, on a network level, how they decide who plays who and where things are shot and all of that. So, like it's a very cool learning experience. I'm psyched about it.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

I can imagine. So I know we have a couple of minutes left, so I have two more quick questions for you. Okay. It always is an icebreaker question of like, oh, who would you want to play you and about the movie about your life? And now you're kind of getting to experience this. Do you have any dream actress you would love to see play you in or Jennifer in this adaptation?

SPEAKER_02 19:43

Yeah, I mean, okay, like everyone I see on TV, I'm like, well, she's too like beautiful and amazing to play me, but you know, a girl can dream. And I actually I love Sarah Pigeon, who's in a love story. I think she's such a great, incredible actress. And I had seen her on Broadway in a show called Stereophonic that she starred in years ago. I didn't even realize it was the same person because she had she was brunette then. She's been my favorite ever since then, and I I admire so many actresses. Um, I love Amanda Seafried or Seyfried, I don't know how you say pronounce her name, but I think she's incredible. Just like there's so many badass girls out there that I would feel really lucky to, you know, have their stamp of approval. But those are two that I've been thinking about. I don't know if they would ever do my show, but I think those are both great options.

SPEAKER_00 20:33

And I think you are gorgeous as well, and it would be perfect for a gorgeous woman to play you. And my last question to kind of round us out is what is your relationship with motherhood like now, now that you are a few years removed from your postpartum depression?

SPEAKER_02 20:48

It's so different, you know, and I think it's a really a testament to how these kids hold up a mirror to you. And if you let them and you learn from it and you work really hard on yourself, you will find your way, I think, in motherhood. Um, or at least it has worked that way for me. I'm not a natural mom. I couldn't count on my, you know, supposed maternal instincts from the jump. I don't like doing a lot of mom stuff, but I'm obsessed with my kids. I mean, I'm so obsessed. I had a second kid, you know, after this really traumatic first experience, I went through IVF, which is very grueling. And I really worked to get my second baby. And I had a totally different birth, a totally non-traumatic birth. I mean, it was gruesome and bloody and scary because that's what birth is, but it was not traumatic because I surrounded myself with caregivers that were trauma informed and were really kind to me. They were all women. Um, I knew so much more going into the second time. I knew how to really protect myself from what had damaged me round one. And I love being a mom now. Like there are things about it that I don't like. Like I'm not good at like playing pretend. Or whatever. I'm I'm really lazy at the park. But there are things about it that I have really grown into and have grown to absolutely love. And now I'm like old and I wish I had four more kids. You know, now I finally figured out how to do it, how it works for me. But look, if I could get there, then I think a lot of women could get there. Unfortunately, like it costs a lot of money to go to therapy, which is really messed up. And I really like as I took meds, you know, I needed prescriptions, etc. So it's not free. But I think self-discovery, you just have to prioritize with whatever resources you have in any way you can because it's what allows you to get in touch with all sides of yourself and to find the maternal within you and to find joy in being a parent. And it's been a huge like game changer for me. And now I'm so happy in my maternal life.

SPEAKER_00 23:00

Well, I am so happy for you and that your story was able to turn around. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to speak with me. I really, really enjoyed this.

SPEAKER_01 23:11

Thank you. Thanks for having me. And um, I can't wait to see how it all comes out.

SPEAKER_00 23:15

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that. Sarah's book is now available in paperback, so be sure to check it out if you haven't read it already. I think you'll definitely find it an informative and also fun read. There is some humor in it. And if you couldn't tell from our interview, she's a great storyteller. She's very passionate, and her life is worth hearing about. So I hope you all have a great week, my book butterflies. I'll see you next time.