Here’s your first clue that you’ve begun a memoir of motherhood like no other. On page four, Sarah Hoover writes: “It was the simple unspeakable reality that from the moment he was born, this baby sometimes meant as much to me as a stone-cold marble statue in the antiquities section of an art museum.”
What follows is a complicated quest for
the reason that Hoover felt so detached from her child and so unmoored in her marriage to a well-known artist.
She writes: “How dare I let myself be this miserable when I was so deeply fortunate?”
Hoover writes candidly about what she calls
the “pernicious” myths that motherhood is
the very essence of femininity and motherhood and re-examines her relationship with her own mother in
“The Motherload.” 
